What Are You Going Through (2020)

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The New York Times -bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship. A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, the friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of them the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices mostly as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, and she is drawn into an intense and transformative experience of her own. With her widely acclaimed novel The Friend , Sigrid Nunez was hailed for her