Her father worked seven days a week, as a kitchen worker and in restaurants, and her mother took care of the household. Growing up in the housing projects of Staten Island in the 1950s, the daughter of a German mother and a Panamanian-Chinese father, Nunez was an imaginative child who turned to books for solace and escape. Ever since she was young, she's never wanted to do anything else: 'I just wanted to do one thing well, and that was the thing.' That's more or less what she's been doing for the past three decades. 'I became a writer because it was something I could do alone and hidden in my room,' Nunez said, perched on a stool at the counter of a coffee shop. So Nunez was a bit surprised to be cast into the spotlight, embraced as a breakout literary star and titanic talent, more than two decades after she published her debut novel. She's the kind of writer the heroine of The Friend laments doesn't exist anymore – one who views writing as a sacred calling rather than an exercise in self-promotion. The rapturous reception has stunned Nunez, 67, who has been quietly writing and publishing books for the past 23 years. The novel, an acerbic but often poignant exploration of love, friendship, death, grief, art and literature, received last year's National Book Award for fiction in the US and drew euphoric reviews from critics, who hailed it as a subtle, unassuming masterpiece.

'Maybe we'll see it.'Īnd yet despite her acid critique of writers and their discontents, or perhaps because of her dead-on depiction, Nunez has won over the literary world with The Friend.

'I can imagine it – well, I did imagine it,' Nunez said of the (still, thankfully, fictional) naked author calendar.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez