American writer Sigrid Nunez’s characters are forever being ambushed by things they thought they had safely put away in the recesses of their past. Memory, in her fiction, is a cluttered cupboard (and not an orderly archive) whose door keeps springing open. The National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, What Are You Going Through and The Vulnerables has always been interested in what remains after an experience has supposedly ended. A friendship may have broken down, a marriage failed or a lover disappeared, but the past refuses to stay where it has been put. It returns through an old letter, an unexpected smell or a seemingly trivial memory, persistent as an unpaid bill.
That movement gives It Will Come Back to You its emotional locus. The title sounds almost reassuring until one begins to wonder: What, exactly, will come back? Love? Regret? Shame? A lost version of one’s self or the consequences of having behaved badly? In Nunez’s world, the answer is usually all of these. The words come from the final, title story, a meditation on ageing and hearing loss. At its centre is Aunt Gilda, an elderly family friend who once became a substitute mother to the narrator but now fills gaps in her past with invention. “As memory fails, imagination steps in,” Nunez writes, recognising the “little novelist” within each of us; even the comic mishearing of “five words” as “five wounds” carries a stab of its own. What returns, then, is not necessarily the truth, but the version of it that time, longing and fear have allowed us to keep.
Published over many years in magazines and journals, the 13 stories acquire fresh meaning when placed beside one another. They reveal the questions Nunez has kept returning to: what do we owe the people closest to us, how well can we ever know them, and how much of what we call memory is really invention? Her characters disappoint, misunderstand and sometimes grievously hurt one another, yet remain helplessly connected. Nunez, however, is fascinated not only by the stories people construct about themselves, but by the moment those stories begin to fall apart. Her characters are intelligent, articulate and capable of analysing everyone except themselves. They know the language of motive, trauma and grief, but knowledge rarely saves them from foolishness. Insight, Nunez reminds us, is not the same thing as good behaviour.
{{/usCountry}}Published over many years in magazines and journals, the 13 stories acquire fresh meaning when placed beside one another. They reveal the questions Nunez has kept returning to: what do we owe the people closest to us, how well can we ever know them, and how much of what we call memory is really invention? Her characters disappoint, misunderstand and sometimes grievously hurt one another, yet remain helplessly connected. Nunez, however, is fascinated not only by the stories people construct about themselves, but by the moment those stories begin to fall apart. Her characters are intelligent, articulate and capable of analysing everyone except themselves. They know the language of motive, trauma and grief, but knowledge rarely saves them from foolishness. Insight, Nunez reminds us, is not the same thing as good behaviour.
{{/usCountry}}In Philosophers, the opening story, she turns a teenage romance into a sly reflection on memory, desire and the certainty of youth. The narrator recalls Ace, an older schoolboy nicknamed “the philosopher” for dividing people into neat categories, and Mrs Mint, the married English teacher who flirts openly with him. Years later, Ace survives the Vietnam War, marries Mrs Mint and dies young of cancer, while the narrator reconsiders jealousy, love and loss from the murkier distance of adulthood. Kierkegaard hovers over the story, linking lost love with the urge to write. The people the narrator once judged so confidently become more complicated with the passage of time.
Nunez’s prose is conversational. A thought is offered, reconsidered, then contradicted. The effect is of someone thinking aloud with unusual honesty, though one suspects every hesitation has been carefully placed. Her humour arrives in a dry aside, an embarrassing social detail, or the recognition that people remain ridiculous even during genuine sorrow. It prevents the collection’s repeated encounters with illness, loneliness, violence and death from becoming oppressive.
Among the strongest stories is Greensleeves. A recently separated therapist meets a younger woman who is deeply worried about her mentally ill brother. The therapist is raw from the failure of his marriage and more emotionally available than is wise. His professional training cannot protect him from his own neediness. Nunez gently punctures the vanity concealed within sympathy: the desire not simply to help someone, but to become important to them.
Curiosity examines the uneasy morality of observing other people. A young woman living alone becomes fascinated by a neighbour who is a sex worker. Her attention begins at a distance and gradually becomes an intrusion. Curiosity is, after all, the novelist’s basic fuel, but it can also be a polite word for trespassing. To invent a life for another person and treat her privacy as a narrative puzzle is hardly innocent. Nunez implicates the reader too: we are curious, and therefore cannot claim spotless hands.
The Naked Juror takes an ordinary situation — jury duty — and allows private history to trickle into it. When a case brushes against something in Flora’s past, the possibility of neutral judgement becomes shaky. Everyone enters the courtroom carrying an invisible suitcase of fears, prejudices, grudges and badly packed memories. The story unsettles the comforting belief that facts can ever be examined entirely apart from the person examining them.
Imagination is darker. Fourteen-year-old Elsie is beginning to realise that adult men look at her differently. She lacks the language to explain why this frightens her, while the adults around her interpret her unease as misbehaviour or adolescent drama. Nunez does not overplay the danger, and that restraint makes the story more disturbing. The horror lies not only in predatory attention but in the adults’ failure to recognise it. Elsie learns that appearances may matter more to grown-ups than her safety, and that a girl may be blamed for attracting the very attention she fears.
The Plan enters the mind of a man who fantasizes about murdering women and prepares to kill his wife. His violence grows out of entitlement, humiliation and bottomless self-pity. Grievance itself becomes permission. The story is chilling, though it is also one of the book’s less subtle pieces. Its moral ground is marked firmly with warning tape, while Nunez is generally more compelling when that ground shifts beneath our feet.
More affecting is It’s All Good, in which a brother and sister care for their mother as dementia changes her personality. Their disagreements expose old tensions because family emergencies arrive with several generations’ worth of luggage. A proposed visit from a Brad Pitt impersonator provides a comic lift that is absurd, touching and faintly desperate. Beneath the joke lies a serious question: when reality has become cruel or inaccessible, might a loving illusion be kinder than truth? Care, Nunez understands, is an untidy mixture of duty, exhaustion, resentment, improvisation and tenderness.
The Rabbit’s Foot follows Carmine, an adopted child raised in poverty whose family later enters a wealthier world. Material circumstances improve, but childhood does not politely vacate the premises. Her early sense that love and belonging are conditional remains lodged within her. Nunez is precise about class shame and family power. Comfort may arrive later, but the body continues behaving as though security could be withdrawn at any moment.
What unites these very different stories is Nunez’s refusal to reduce people to the worst thing they have done, suffered or failed to understand. She is alert to vanity, cruelty and self-deception, but never writes as though exposing them were enough. Her real interest lies in the uncertain territory between what happened and what people can bear to remember.
In It Will Come Back to You, the past is neither an accurate record nor a lesson neatly learned. It is unruly, selective and sometimes embarrassingly alive. We edit and rearrange it because life’s raw material is often too shapeless to bear. And so it returns not as fact but as story: it knocks, walks in without waiting and immediately begins correcting our version of events.
Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist, translator and poet. He lives in New Delhi.