What Are You Going Through
2020 • 210 pages
Ratings10
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings10
Average rating3.8
**THE BRAND-NEW NOVEL BY THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER** A woman visits a friend with terminal cancer. Brilliant, strong-willed and alone, the friend, facing death, makes a momentous request. Will she accompany her on a holiday where she will, without warning one day, take a lethal pill to end her life on her own terms? Shaken and grieving, she finds the strength to agree. What follows is an extraordinary story - profound, surprising and often funny - of a lifelong friendship given the ultimate challenge; to witness its end. Utterly of our moment and timeless, What Are You Going Through is a deeply moving affirmation of life in its current existential threat and in its ordinary tragedies - the loss, loneliness, and the love that yet survives.
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UPDATE: worth rereading. So I did. What an exquisite voice. What a beautiful book. I can't say what it's about, any more than I can say what life is about, only that it's a meandering, disjointed path touching on loneliness, communication, relationships, aging, memory, listening. The first-person narration is almost ethereal: we learn almost nothing of her, she goes through life taking up very little space but missing out on little. The whole book is her observations on interactions with others, with a big ghostly gap where we'd usually have an active character. Somehow, by hiding the person, Nuñez highlights the ways in which we navigate our lives, how we learn (or don't), grow (ditto), come to peace with ourselves. Nuñez paints behaviors I recognize, in myself and in people I love and in people I avoid, and she has me thinking about who I want to be.
[Original review: Probably not the best book to read on a painful flight home from a memorial for someone who, four months ago, did not know he had cancer. I kept going anyway: maybe the Universe had a message for me? (No, of course I don't believe that stupid shit. But I do believe in learning from every opportunity that's handed to me. And learn I did. But I don't think I can write about this book right now.)]
