Book· 2020· Literary

What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

What Are You Going Through: 1 recorded work traces back to it.

Open on the map

What What Are You Going Through influenced

Works that record this one as a source, with the evidence a contributor gave.

About the work

What Are You Going Through

Its exploration of friendship, life and death received mostly positive reviews. 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, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people 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 for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.