Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through is a slender, deceptively quiet novel that carries the weight of a philosophical treatise. Worth adding: published in 2020, it arrived at a moment when the world was collectively confronting mortality, isolation, and the fragility of human connection. The book follows an unnamed narrator, a writer navigating the mundane and the miraculous, who agrees to help a former mentor end her life on her own terms. It is a story about the act of witnessing—witnessing death, witnessing suffering, and witnessing the small, stubborn beauties that persist alongside them.
The Premise: A Request and a Journey
The narrative begins with the narrator receiving a visit from an old friend, a woman she refers to simply as "the friend" or "my friend.Here's the thing — " This woman, once a formidable intellectual and teacher, is now dying of cancer. She has decided to stop treatment and pursue voluntary assisted dying, a process that requires her to travel to a jurisdiction where it is legal. She asks the narrator to accompany her Simple, but easy to overlook..
Real talk — this step gets skipped all the time.
This request sets the stage for a road trip that is less about geography and more about the interior landscape of two women who have spent lifetimes thinking, reading, and talking. The narrator, characteristically observant and slightly detached, agrees. What follows is not a melodramatic countdown to death, but a series of conversations, silences, observations of the natural world, and encounters with strangers that illuminate the texture of a life coming to a close.
Themes of Agency and the "Good Death"
Central to the novel is the concept of agency. The friend’s decision is not born of despair alone, but of a fierce desire to author her own ending. On the flip side, she rejects the protracted indignities of hospital death—the tubes, the loss of cognition, the burden on loved ones—in favor of a controlled, peaceful exit. Nunez handles the logistics of assisted dying with a matter-of-fact clarity that demystifies the process without stripping it of gravity.
The novel explores the distinction between suicide and assisted dying, a semantic and moral battlefield. The friend frames her choice as a final act of autonomy, a way to reclaim the narrative of her body from the disease. The narrator grapples with the moral weight of complicity. Is she a witness? An accomplice? A friend? The book suggests she is all three, and that love often requires us to inhabit uncomfortable roles Less friction, more output..
The Art of Listening and the Burden of Storytelling
Nunez, a writer deeply concerned with the ethics of narration, uses the protagonist’s profession to interrogate the act of storytelling itself. There is a recurring motif: "What are you going through?The narrator is constantly approached by people—strangers on planes, acquaintances at parties, a student in crisis—who unload their traumas onto her. " becomes a question the world asks the writer, expecting her to alchemize pain into prose.
This dynamic creates a tension between experiencing and recording. The narrator worries that by turning her friend’s death into material, she betrays the intimacy of the moment. Yet, she also recognizes that storytelling is how humans make sense of chaos. The novel itself becomes an argument for the necessity of bearing witness, even—or especially—when the witness feels inadequate And that's really what it comes down to..
Friendship as a Form of Love
Stripped of romance or family obligation, the friendship at the core of the book is revealed as a profound, chosen bond. It is a relationship built on intellectual parity, shared history, and a comfortable lack of sentimentality. They do not say "I love you" in grand declarations; they say it by discussing the syntax of a sentence, the behavior of a bird, or the quality of the light in a hotel room.
Nunez portrays female friendship with a rarity in literature: as a relationship of equals that endures without drama. The friend is not a saintly victim; she is cranky, demanding, funny, and sharp until the very end. The narrator is not a selfless caregiver; she is tired, anxious, and occasionally resentful of the emotional labor. Day to day, this honesty elevates their connection. The care they offer each other is freely given precisely because it is not owed by blood or law.
The Role of Animals and the Natural World
Animals populate the periphery of this novel with surprising significance. Also, the narrator’s observations of animals—a hawk carrying a snake, a deer in the woods, the friend’s cat—serve as reminders of the biological reality of death. The friend’s dog, a small, aging creature named Apollo, becomes a silent participant in the journey. Nature does not mourn; it recycles Most people skip this — try not to..
The official docs gloss over this. That's a mistake.
These moments provide a counterpoint to human anxiety. Plus, when the narrator watches a bird build a nest or a spider spin a web, there is a sense of continuity that transcends individual tragedy. That said, the natural world offers a non-anthropocentric perspective: death is not a failure, but a necessary component of the cycle. This perspective helps the narrator, and the reader, locate a measure of peace amidst the grief.
Structure and Style: The Fragmented Narrative
The novel’s structure mimics the workings of memory and thought. It moves in fragments—vignettes, anecdotes, quotes from other writers (Wittgenstein, Coetzee, Weil), and philosophical asides. This fragmentation reflects the narrator’s state of mind: distracted, associative, trying to hold onto the present while the future looms.
Nunez’s prose is crystalline, devoid of ornamentation. She writes with a "cool eye," a term often used to describe her style, but one that risks implying coldness. She refuses to manipulate the reader’s emotions through adjectives. A better descriptor might be precision. Instead, she presents a scene—a woman struggling to put on a shoe, the taste of a peach, the sound of rain—and allows the emotional resonance to rise organically. The humor woven throughout is dry and essential, preventing the narrative from collapsing under its own weight And it works..
The Ending: Presence Over Closure
Without spoiling the final pages, the conclusion of What Are You Going Through refuses the comfort of "closure.So the narrator stays in the room. " There is no grand epiphany, no sudden acceptance of mortality. Which means she stays with the body. There is only the act of staying. She stays with the grief.
The final image is one of profound solitude that is paradoxically shared. Consider this: the narrator walks out into the world, alive, carrying the dead woman inside her. The book ends not with a period, but with an ellipsis—an acknowledgement that the "going through" continues for the living. The title question—What are you going through?—remains open-ended, an invitation to empathy rather than a demand for an answer.
Why This Novel Resonates Now
Written before the global pandemic but published deep within it, the novel acquired an unintentional urgency. It speaks to a collective experience of anticipatory grief, of calculating risk, of navigating the bureaucracy of death, and of the desperate need for human touch in the face of contagion.
Even so, its relevance extends beyond the zeitgeist. It addresses the perennial human condition: we are all going through something. Nunez suggests that the only appropriate response to this reality is attention. Because of that, we are all dying, just at different speeds. To pay attention to a friend’s pain, to the flight of a bird, to the rhythm of a sentence—this is how we love the world, even as we prepare to leave it Easy to understand, harder to ignore. Worth knowing..
Key Takeaways
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Autonomy in Dying: The novel presents a nuanced, compassionate argument for the right to die with dignity, framing it as an extension of a life lived intentionally Not complicated — just consistent..
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The Ethics of Witnessing: It challenges the reader to consider the difference between using a story and honoring a life.
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Friendship as High Stakes: It elevates platonic love to the status of the ultimate human bond—chosen, durable, and defining.
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**H
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Humor as Survival: The novel demonstrates that levity is not a betrayal of grief but a necessary counterweight, allowing the narrator—and the reader—to breathe amid the suffocating weight of farewell.
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Literature as Companion: By embedding references to Coetzee, Woolf, and Rilke within the fabric of daily caregiving, Nunez argues that reading is not escapism; it is a form of preparation, a way to rehearse the inevitable so that when the moment arrives, we might meet it with a steadier hand.
Conclusion
The bottom line: What Are You Going Through is a masterclass in the art of letting go—of the body, of the ego, of the illusion of control. Also, sigrid Nunez has written a book that feels less like a constructed narrative and more like a whispered confidence passed between strangers in a waiting room. It insists that the most radical act of love in a culture obsessed with fixing and curing is simply to witness: to sit beside the bed, to hand over the water, to listen to the silence between breaths without rushing to fill it.
The novel leaves the reader not with answers, but with a clarified vision. Consider this: it suggests that the "going through" is the destination—that the messy, boring, heartbreaking, funny, flesh-and-blood business of accompanying one another is the very substance of a life well-lived. But long after the final page is turned, the title lingers not as a question mark, but as a directive: *Ask. Listen. Plus, stay. * That is how we measure a life. That is how we honor the end And that's really what it comes down to..
