I took a walk with Nunez through her West Village Manhattan neighborhood on a sunny, sparkling afternoon in January. Over the next few days, we continued our conversation about two of Nunez’s books just out in paperback this winter. The Last of Her Kind, which critics have called “a truly great American novel,” explores a tumultuous friendship between women from very different backgrounds who meet as roommates in the late sixties. Mitz is a playful, shrewd biography of Virginia Woolf’s pet monkey.

Jess deCourcy Hinds: These are such different books. What comes to mind when you think of them together?

Sigrid Nunez: To begin with, The Last of Her Kind was first published a year ago and Mitz first came out almost a decade ago. The Last of Her Kind is my longest book and Mitz is my shortest, and when I think about the five books I’ve published and the one I’m working on now, these two are probably the most unlike each other. Though Mitz was hard to write, as all writing is hard, I remember having a lot of fun, surely the most fun I’ve had writing a book.

JDH: So what made Mitz more fun to write than your other novels?

SN: Well, it was a playful idea to begin with, and so different from anything else I’d done. And also it was fun to write about Britain in the 1930s, and about the lives of people who fascinated me and whom I’d admired for so many years. And it was great fun to write about nonhumans, not just Mitz the marmoset but also the Woolfs’ two dogs, Pinka and Sally.

JDH: I thought I already knew a lot about Woolf when I picked up Mitz, but was surprised by how much I didn’t know. What were you most surprised or grateful to learn about Woolf through writing this book?

SN: Rereading the Bloomsbury literature, particularly Virginia Woolf’s journals and letters, I was reminded over and over again what a terrific sense of humor she had, and how heroic she was in the face of serious mental illness. And, above all, how well she was able to describe the creative process and what it’s like to be a writer.

JDH: Mitz began as a children’s book. How did it become a book for adults?

SN: Mitz was inspired by Woolf’s book Flush, a mock biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. My idea was to write a children’s book about the Woolfs’ pet monkey, but my publisher said you can’t write a children’s book that doesn’t have any children in it, and so I should write the book for adults. At first I had my doubts, but then I thought, well, Flush isn’t a children’s book, and I decided to try it.

JDH: You write your animal characters in such a compelling, unsentimental way. How would you compare the process of creating an animal character to creating a human character?

SN: I don’t think there is much difference, at least not for me.

JDH: Really? Writing about a monkey came easily and naturally from the very beginning?

SN: It felt as natural as writing about any other character, yes. That might be partly because I love animals, and I’ve always had pets myself, mostly cats. Also, as a child, the first stories I ever wrote were almost all about animals. I remember one story in particular, about a hippopotamus who scaled a mountain.

JDH: How delightful! Let’s talk about The Last of Her Kind, which explores the reverberations of the sixties through 30 years of two women’s lives. What kinds of responses have you gotten from readers?

SN: One of the most interesting responses I’ve gotten so far was from a woman who came of age in the sixties. She told me that if I’d written the book longer ago it could have saved her years of therapy, because the book enlightened things about her past that she’d been trying to figure out ever since. And I suppose that’s one of the main reasons I wrote the book: I myself was trying to understand what happened back in those crazy days. And there’s nothing like writing at length about a subject to get you to really think about it.

Another interesting response I’ve gotten has been from people who said they wanted their grown children to read the book, to give them a sense of what it was like when the parents were the younger generation, and how different it was, growing up in that revolutionary time.

JDH: Your novel certainly made my parents’ generation come alive for me—more so than any other sixties novel or movie I’ve encountered. When I finished reading the novel, I was so absorbed in the era and the characters, I was just reeling, and I had enormous difficulty getting back to my real life. How did it feel to you, living in one era and writing about another?

SN: I think whenever you’re writing a novel you’re existing in two different realities. Which reminds me of something Margaret Atwood said: When you’re writing you’re not living, and when you’re living you’re not writing, and there is always that tension.

JDH: A number of critics have said you've blurred genre boundaries in your writing.

SN: I’ve done what a lot of other writers have done: I’ve written some things that could be described as hybrid works, for example my first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, which is part fiction and part autobiography. Mitz is another such book: partly invented and partly based on real events in the lives of Virginia Woolf and her circle. Woolf herself had a dream of one day writing a kind of hybrid book that would be what she called an “essay-novel.” The great master of this kind of genre is, of course, Proust, but writers such as Philip Roth, Milan Kundera, V. S. Naipaul, W. G. Sebald, and Elizabeth Hardwick also come to mind.

I’m drawn to these writers and to work of mixed genre, but in fact most of my work does not belong to this genre. It only seems that way to some readers because I often write from a first-person point of view, in the form of a memoir or personal story.

JDH: Would you like to say anything about what you’re writing now?

SN: I’m working on a new novel. All I’ll say about it now is that it will be the first book of mine in which the main character is male.

JDH: I look forward to reading that! I’m one of your many devoted fans who scramble to get your new hardcovers the minute they hit the shelves. Surely, you’ll find an even wider audience with the paperback release of Mitz and The Last of Her Kind, books that are so accomplished in such different ways. What are you most proud of in each of these books?

SN: Oh, I guess just that I managed to finish them!

Buy the Book

Sigrid Nunez is the author of five novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, and, most recently, The Last of Her Kind. A new edition of her third book, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, will be published by Soft Skull Press on February 28, 2007. Nunez has received several awards, including a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Further information can be found at the author’s Web site: www.sigridnunez.com.

Jess deCourcy Hinds became the new Book Review Editor of Small Spiral Notebook in January 2007. She has written for Ms. magazine, The Artful Mind, Snake River Review, and other publications. She won first-prize in the Louis B. Goodman fiction scholarship competition at Michael Cunningham’s MFA program at Brooklyn College.

*author photo credit: marion ettlinger