Motley Kamuka

In college I was assigned The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker and was absolutely bewitched. I have read a lot of death literature, death memoirs, How We Die, and A Year of Magical Thinking. One book about a book club with his dying mother. A poet dying, where she says cute things I identify with, and the one by a doctor, that made me cry reading the epilogue by the wife. Sigrid Nunez has a novel about death, from earth dying, to an elderly neighbor, to being a kind of death doula to her friend.  I'm feeling more emotionally fragile with the breakup of my marriage, and the stress of quarantine, but I'm reading through Nunez and my library made the book available so I started reading it. I didn't even get halfway in the 2 weeks, but it came around again and I'm going to finish it now that I've identified my resistance to reading it. What Are You Going Through is the usual clear smooth literate narrative by Nunez. On Netflix it would be called "Slow Burn"....

This book is brilliant in all kinds of ways, including the prediction and the effects of a pandemic in 2010, but I found this extended passage quite descriptive of my eldest son (I lost paragraphs): "In fact, he’d never read a whole book all the way through, not even when he was supposed to for school. He would read only as much as he had to in order to do the assignment. Depending on the book, he might skim all the pages or he’d read a chapter or two from the beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes he’d just Google or SparkNote the book. He’d never once got into trouble for not reading a whole book—proof that reading every page could not be all that important. He wasn’t making any kind of statement. He was truly bored by most of the reading assigned at school—and he wasn’t the only one. Besides, he thought his parents were wrong. The kind of reading they did was something almost no one did anymore. Lots of successful people didn’t read books and the smartest kids at school weren’t ...

  My dear friend told me his new favorite author was Sigrid Nunez . My library has a few books by her that I can get electronically. I got Mitz first. It's about a marmoset that Leonard and Virginia Woolf had. Nunez  has 8 novels and a sort of memoir of being around Susan Sontag and dating her son. She published her first book in 1995, when she was 44. She was an editorial assistant for the New York Review of Books. Her mother is German and her father is Panamanian-Chinese. Her first novel sounds like a memoir of her early years. Books: (x=read) A Feather on the Breath of God Naked Sleeper Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (X) For Rouenna The Last of Her Kind Salvation City (X) Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag The Friend (X) What Are You Going Through (X) Links NPR Interview The Friend : "With ‘The Friend,’ Sigrid Nunez Becomes an Overnight Literary Sensation, 23 Years and Eight Books Later" (NY Times) "she decided to write a novel about a woman who is grieving...