I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley,

This is an unique collection of stories. There's humor, advice, wisdom, tragedy and some heartfelt moments as well.

This is the type of book that will make you think long after you read it.
well worth the read.

Excellent book about death, forgiveness, and friendship. This book really got me thinking about important topics after someone close to me passed from cancer. Really fantastic.

I’m judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got me to read on even though it was among 296 other books I’m charged to read.

In the photograph, he looks harsh—no, “harsh” is too harsh. Call it stern. That look that comes to many older white men at a certain age: stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze. Like raptors. Hardly inviting. Hardly an image to say, Please, do come hear my speak. Would love to see you there! More like, Make no mistake, I know a lot more than you do. You should listen to me. Maybe then you’ll know what’s what.

It's funny that NetGalley asks reviewers if the cover drew them in when requesting a book. This cover did the opposite for me, and I actually wonder how much of an impact that had on my reading experience. But this is a very creative and unique book, and the author made a lot of artistic decisions that I honestly feel like would have been better received if the cover reflected this a little more. I don't really like novels that are this vague - I don't usually understand the purpose of leaving out names, for instance. But I am glad that others enjoyed this.

Oof, what an absolute gut-punch of a novel. Short, piercing, and heartbreaking, this masterpiece solidifies Nunez once again as a truly incredible author. This is a book about dying, about friendship, and about the world ending. Not for the faint-hearted but worth every second.

This book is the type to make you sit quietly and stare out the window for a while once you’ve finished it.

Nunez plays on similar themes as her National Book Award winner "The Friend." No one writes quite like Nunez and I am drawn in by her observations on friendship, life in general, grief, and death.

I enjoyed the themes explored in this book – life, death, friendship – which I enjoy, but the pacing and organization wasn't to my taste. Despite its length, I found myself struggling to get through this slow-moving story and wanted to like it so much more than I did.

Reading a book by Nunez makes me feel utterly human with the weight of humanity pressing down on me. Or that I'm looking at Very Important Modern Art, and I love it, but I know there is something deeper that I'm not seeing. I very much enjoyed The Friend in all it's quirkiness, and equally enjoyed this book, as much as one can spending that much time waiting for the death of a character.

Lovely and thought provoking. Read it many months ago, yet as soon as I thought about it, the feeling of calmness that I felt while reading this book came over me once again. Not every book has to thrill or make your heart race. Sometimes it's good to slow down and contemplate what makes us human.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Nunez’s previous work, The Friend, which received a lot of praise. I was hesitant starting this, but found it moving and charming.

Imaginative, compulsively readable, I think this book should've been much more popular. There's a monologue by a talking cat. Sigrid Nunez is brilliant -- the plot of the story is pretty depressing, but she makes the material feel warm and bright.

“I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”

Such a short novel with very huge themes is the best way I could describe this book that hit all bookstores today! An unnamed woman narrates the reader through various life experiences and relationships culminating in her decision to do a favor for a friend with terminal cancer. The favor? Accompany the friend on a trip in which the friend will at some point end her own life.

Examining the meaning of life & death & what true companionship/friendship looks like throughout the span of life, this slow-moving novel asks a lot from the Reader.

Written in what appears to be a series of ruminations about the choices we make, this is also the story of a life coming to an end, as well as a story about friendship, love, estrangement and loss. If you enjoyed Nunez' The Friend, you are likely to enjoy this short but powerful one as well.

This was a really sweet book, but it wasn't very memorable. I think it had to do the writing style. It's very stream-of-consciousness which I found very distracting and muddled. Sigrid Nunez has a lot of promise as an author, but I just wish his prose wasn't so hard to follow. There were many emotional beats and moments throughout this story, but I was disappointed overall.

I struggled to get through this book - partly due to my own doing but it took me time to get into it. I did enjoy the Friend and the writing style was similar. I did ultimately finish it and did enjoy the story and the thread that was woven throughout. I will still recommend to this title to those interested in the topic of end of life issues, assisted suicide, and readers that like the author’s previous titles.

Thanks, Riverhead & NetGalley for the e-copy for review.
DNFed at 28%.

There seems to be a rise in literary fiction books with unnamed, detached narrators who provide seemingly random details about a variety of topics. While I’ve enjoyed this style before, What Are You Going Through just did not work for me. The narrator tells detailed stories about events in her life and the lives of people she knows: we read almost the entirety of a doomsday climate talk, and multiple pages detailing a misogynistic crime novel. I was intrigued to see where the climate change discussions would go, since it was briefly reminding me of Weather by Jenny Offill. However, it features so many asides talking about other women, shaming them for their bodies, and assuming what they must be thinking and judging them for it, and I’m just not interested in reading any further.

Our unnamed narrator is caring for a friend with a terminal cancer diagnosis. Or as her friend prefers, a fatal diagnosis. As she spends time with her friend, the narrator also shares conversations with strangers - an Airbnb host, a friend of a friend, someone in a gym locker room - all focused on aging, death, and reconciling the person you wanted to be with the person you've become.

This is everything I love about Sigrid Nunez. It's the kind of quiet brilliance that gets under your skin and changes your perspective without you really noticing. Nunez's writing seems so honest and spare, but will also suddenly take your breath away. It's difficult to explain; you really must read it for yourself.

This is a wonderful, wonderful book. For a book about a friend dying of cancer as well as other sad topics, it's actually quite funny. The narrator (first person) givens us an account of her activities, conversations, readings, thoughts, and memories in a stream of consciousness that does not strike an artificial note of experimentation but feels incredibly genuine, as though one is the friend (the dying friend?) in conversation with the narrator. All of the stories the narrator tells connect through their preoccupation with grief, regret, and memory, but they are told with such immediacy that the reader (or at least this one) doesn't feel struck by an artificially constructed , heavy-handed focus on theme. It's a marvelous book.

In What Are You Going Through, the narrator encounters the phenomenon that sometimes happens as you get older where you are past forming new relationships and your old ones have moved and changed. One friend is approaching death from cancer and she captures the absurdity and how a person changes during that journey so well - this is not a Lifetime movie.

At the same time I'm having a hard time letting this stick to my bones - it's probably too close to my actual experiences to feel all that memorable. I see truth here but it's truth I already know. Which in the end is a bit of a strange reading experience.

I wanted to read it because I really loved her last book, The Friend. The style and themes are really quite similar but if I were to recommend a starting place it would be The Friend first.

I'm not usually a fan of the stream of consciousness style of writing, but this one really worked for me. It flowed naturally like a beautiful piece of classical music, and like the narrator's friend says, at times it felt like it was "too serious, too moving, too unbearably sad."

At the beginning, I felt like the narrator was trying to connect with the various people she talked to, yet was not fully able to do so. She relays the voices of her ex-boyfriend who gives lectures on how mankind has destroyed the earth and the selfish nature of humans ("Self-care, relieving one's own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society's highest goals"). Her friend also echos these thoughts (she had never seen anyone who could be said to have become a better person by doing yoga, she said, unless being a better person meant feeling better about yourself). Yet the narrator herself never really states her true feelings.

Instead, she speaks of the inadequacy of language: "I knew that whatever I might manage to describe would turn out to be, at best, somewhere to the side of the thing, while the thing itself slipped past me, like the cat you never even see escape when you open the house door." The stories she tells of others illustrate suffering, the need to be loved, and how difficult it is to connect.

Yet, by the narrator spending time with and standing by her terminally-ill friend, we do see a beautiful connection develop. Again, she doesn't describe her feelings toward her friend, but you can just feel it. As the main focus of the book is on this friend's decision to end her life with dignity, this is certainly a book about the meaning of life and death. The author's talent is in making you feel, without explaining, both the pain and joy of being alive. My words could not do it justice, but as trite as it may sound, this novel is beautiful and poignant.