Whenever I read something that’s supposed to be an animal narrating, I find I can’t accept it, because it’s always obviously a human’s point of view. I was sort-of listening to Fresh Air on NPR the other day while going through old photos when I suddenly realized the guest, author Sigrid Nunez, and host Terry Gross, were talking about childlessness.I started taking notes. What I’m not so interested in is writing from an animal’s point of view, though I sometimes try to. It’s a fitting project for a novelist whose name simultaneously reveals and conceals her background. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. In the past eleven years, Sigrid Nunez has written five novels, all of which are subtle investigations of how one’s identity is forged in that space between what is known, or can be known, and what is withheld. Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend.She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Nevertheless capable of some deft footwork, she explains to our man in Boston how the two pastimes are similar. Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels including A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and The Friend, which received the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize.Her honors and awards include four Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and … Sigrid Nunez wanted to be a dancer, and lucky for her readers, that didn’t work out as planned. Nunez has a new book, The Friend, in which a childless woman inherits a Great Dane left behind by a friend who committed suicide. Sigrid Nunez: I’ve always loved animals—all animals, really—and I find writing about them a lot of fun. Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. I started taking notes. Nunez has a new book, The Friend, in which a childless woman inherits a Great Dane left… I was sort-of listening to Fresh Air on NPR the other day while going through old photos when I suddenly realized the guest, author Sigrid Nunez, and host Terry Gross, were talking about childlessness. Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She received her BA from Barnard College (1972) and her MFA from Columbia University (1975), after which she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books.