Summary

Sigrid Nunez’s novel is narrated in the present tense by first-person, unnamed female narrator who is a writer. Throughout the novel, the narrator addresses an unnamed male “you,” who killed himself sometime before the narrator began writing the novel. The narrator and “you” met when the narrator was in a writing workshop and “you” was her teacher. The novel begins by the narrator telling a short anecdote about Cambodian women in the 1980s. The women are war-refugees, who “[cry] [themselves] blind” after seeing the horrors of war (1).

The narrator then addresses “you,” saying the last thing they talked about before the suicide were these Cambodian women, as well as “best wishes for the new year” because it was the holiday (2). The narrator reminisces about “you,” remembering that he was a writer and thought walking around aimlessly was essential to writing. “You” said...