Interviews | October 07, 2026

Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. Her first collection of short stories, It Will Come Back to You, was published in July. Nunez 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 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. 

Stefanie Wortman: The stories in It Will Come Back to You were published over a span of at least fourteen years, and I imagine they were written over an even longer time. When you collected them for this book, how much did you go back and edit the older stories? Do you have that impulse when you revisit older work? 

Sigrid Nunez: I didn’t edit the stories at all. I chose to include only stories that I thought didn’t need editing or revision. And I’m like a lot of writers: I dread rereading old work, though I sometimes have to do so to check a translation. I worry that all I’ll see is how much better the writing could have been. But of course in the case of published work, it’s too late to make improvements. 

Robert Long Foreman: Do you know what you’re writing when you start writing it? Has a project you meant to be a novel turned out to be a short story, or vice versa? 

SN: I almost always start out knowing very little about where a story or novel is going to take me. I write linearly, one sentence at a time, making things up as well as revising as I go along. This way, once I come to the end of something, it’s basically finished except for some minor changes. I never make outlines or write full-length drafts. I want what happens in a narrative to come out of whatever has come before. It has happened that what I thought was a short work turned into a novel. Such was the case with my first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God. But no novel in progress has ever turned out to be a short story.