A writer receives a letter from her high school teacher, who married the writer’s high school sweetheart. A professional Brad Pitt impersonator entertains a woman with dementia. A stoical former lover reappears as the defendant in a murder case. A British aristocrat, masquerading as Keith Richards, menaces a hotel employee and gives birth to an enduring fantasy.
These are just a few of the strange, serendipitous encounters that fill the pages of It Will Come Back to You, Sigrid Nunez’s new collection of short fiction. Comprising 13 stories, all previously published, the collection explores the writer’s long-standing preoccupations with the clashing of social classes, the consolations of the intellect, and the messy romantic lives of women who love men. The women at the center of these stories—with few exceptions, the stories are told from a woman’s point of view—are, for the most part, intelligent, unmarried, and unsentimental about aging but afraid of death itself. Some are writers; others merely have novelistic imaginations. All are inclined to speculate about their acquaintances and to fill memory’s gaps with their own inventions.
They share with the narrators of Nunez’s best novels a flaneur’s sensibility, honed over many years. (Nunez is 75.) They wander the streets of New York City, encountering friends and strangers, reflecting on their favorite books and films, and remembering scenes from their younger years, which were spent walking the very same streets. In this way, they resemble the narrator of her prize-winning novel The Friend (2018), who, traveling from Manhattan to Brooklyn, recalls scenes from a vibrant, complicated friendship with her recently deceased mentor. The narrator of Nunez’s subsequent book, What Are You Going Through (2020), operates similarly: At the gym she’s attended for years, she looks around the locker room and remembers a time when both she and a woman she recognizes were younger and leaner. For women like these, the city is a kind of palimpsest, and their walks are projects of excavation. (This they share with the memoirs of Vivian Gornick, another native New Yorker.) While the women at the center of her novels sometimes long for their youth—and their youthful beauty—they also recognize that the richness of their lives depends on the experiences and relationships they’ve accrued with age.
These stories, spanning Nunez’s career, capture the ways the city can shape life’s different phases. We meet women just starting out as city dwellers and those who have lived in the same apartment for years. Characters scan the streets that surround them, comparing themselves to other women, and trying to place themselves in life’s grand, finite sweep. Set free from social conventions and the narratives that accompany them, they seek out the sorts of experiences that make for good stories: one-night stands and doomed love affairs, cocktail parties and courtroom dramas. If they’re not generating their own stories, they’re mulling those shared by friends and relatives, people they once thought they knew. The best stories in It Will Come Back to You are those that could only take place in a big city, where women are empowered to create their own lives in every sense.
It Will Come Back to You is presented as Nunez’s first collection of stories, suggesting a pivot for a writer who has published nine novels. But her astonishing debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), published when Nunez was 43, is also, in some sense, a collection of stories. “Chang,” the first section of the novel, was published as a stand-alone story in The Threepenny Review in 1989; “Christa,” a companion story, appeared in The Iowa Review two years later. “Chang” is about Nunez’s father, a Chinese Panamanian immigrant, a silent type who worked himself to death. “Christa” is about her mother, a German housewife whose sense of humor helped her cope with an exhausting life. The third and fourth sections of the novel describe the narrator’s teenage years and young adulthood, periods marked, respectively, by her arduous training as a ballerina and by a passionate, potentially dangerous affair with a Russian taxi driver. The stories might best be classified as autofiction: Nunez has said that “Chang” in particular could have been published as nonfiction because “it’s all true.”
Though different in focus, the novel’s four sections share an elegiac tone and a curiosity about the past. “One wants a way of looking back without anger or bitterness or shame,” Nunez writes at one point. Later, mulling over her younger self’s boldness, the narrator asks, “Why did she go with this man? What was she looking for?” Like an analysand free-associating on the couch, the narrator of Feather recounts her formative experiences, seeking to understand them—or, perhaps, to be free of them.
Nunez’s strongest novels preserve this associative quality. The narrator of The Friend sounds much like the narrator of Feather: She is erudite and intellectually curious, attentive to nuance and inclined to citation. The book is an elegy for the writer’s friend and mentor who has recently died by suicide, as well as her attempt to work through her grief—in part by taking in her dead friend’s Great Dane, who becomes another friend. Far from a straightforward account of these intimate relationships—between teacher and student, between woman and dog—the novel weaves together the narrator’s notes from the narrator’s stalled writing projects, memories of her friend, anecdotes from the classroom (like her mentor, the narrator is also a teacher of creative writing), encounters with dog-curious strangers, and reflections on the sexual politics of the literary scene. While the narrator doesn’t quite excuse her friend’s tendency to treat the classroom as a dating pool, she nonetheless finds him sympathetic and comprehensible. Published in the immediate wake of the #MeToo movement, the novel earned Nunez the National Book Award for fiction.
The stories in It Will Come Back to You are each more tightly focused on a specific scenario, but they are linked by setting. Manhattan and the outer boroughs provide the backdrop for nearly every story, enabling the coincidences and conflicts that drive the plot. Characters are constantly running into people they know, or think they know, from the pages of a tabloid or from a past life. In “The Naked Juror,” a middle-aged writer named Flora, reporting for jury duty, believes she recognizes the defendant as a former lover, Bruno, an Eastern European immigrant who worked in the building next to her old home. Though initially shocked, Flora reminds herself that this is the kind of thing that happens in New York: “Millions of people lived in this town, yet such things were bound to happen—in fact, more than likely, it had happened before that a juror had recognized a defendant,” she muses. But it turns out she had the wrong man: Later, wandering her old neighborhood, she crosses paths with the actual Bruno—older, preoccupied—and chastises herself for the error.
For Flora and others, the city is full of familiar faces; nobody ever truly goes missing. In “Curiosity,” a young woman waiting tables at a Bowery bar finds herself serving her mysterious neighbor, a sex worker who seems to use a pseudonym. In “Philosophers,” a writer receives a letter from her high school English teacher, informing her that the classmate she once loved died not long after becoming the teacher’s second husband. “This is a big city, perceived by outsiders as a place where you can easily lead an anonymous life,” observes the narrator of “The Balloon.” “But we who live here know that we must be prepared to run into acquaintances each time we step out our doors.”
For those characters who, like Nunez, grew up in New York, the city is a minefield of memories. “The Rabbit’s Foot” traces the shifting relations among three generations of native New Yorkers: Carmine, a foundling raised in the Bronx, who goes on to work in a fancy Manhattan hotel; Teresa, her ambitious daughter, who makes a fortune in finance and lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn; and Celina, Teresa’s daughter, who valorizes her grandmother’s working-class roots. Each interprets Carmine’s life differently: Teresa is outraged by the social injustice she perceives, while Celina is both admiring and sympathetic. Carmine herself is ashamed. “Wasn’t the world a funny place?” Nunez writes. “To Celina, it was her mother’s overvalued, late-capitalist career and class privilege that were cause for shame.” Each woman interprets another’s life according to her own values.
In the story’s narrative present, Carmine and Celina are having afternoon tea at the hotel where Carmine once worked in housekeeping. Returning to her former place of employment, Carmine recalls being held at knifepoint by a strung-out British lord. The man had been accused of seducing a 15-year-old girl under false pretenses. Carmine, who happened to be on the scene when hotel management confronted the guest, ends up, briefly, as a hostage. Teresa has always found the story upsetting: Her mother “might as well have been the steak” on the room service tray. But Carmine, who never told Teresa the complete story, remembers the event as sort of sexy. Celina, unknowingly echoing her mother, tells Carmine she has “nothing to be ashamed of,” but Carmine knows, as her descendants apparently don’t, that shame operates independent of rational thought, and that it can shape our desires and our lives. The story ends with grandmother and granddaughter shamelessly eating all the food offered to them—“every sandwich, every scone, every piece of cake”—an ambiguous image of female appetite.
“The Rabbit’s Foot” is one of several stories exploring the mother-daughter dyad. The aptly named “Mother-Daughter Story” begins with the incomplete sentence “How to explain to her daughter.” Mo and her grown daughter, Jo, are cleaning out Mo’s deceased mother’s house. The two are so close that they go by the compound noun “MoJo,” yet each disappoints the other in small and subtle ways. Mo had been a disappointment to her own mother, who was critical and disinterested. “When a person has had a bad parent, the person remains that parent’s child all their life,” Jo reflects.
Even the daughter of a good enough mother remains a daughter all her life. In “It’s All Good,” a woman in her late forties tries to manage her grief as her mother slides into early-onset dementia. Gathering for a birthday celebration with her mother, now a resident of an assisted-living facility; her happy-go-lucky younger brother; and a Brad Pitt look-alike hired to amuse their mother, the narrator strives to match her brother’s high spirits. But she finds herself longing for the mother she remembers: a woman who played golf, cleaned her house, and drove herself into Manhattan to take in a Broadway show. “I never saw that woman again,” the narrator reflects. And yet, much like her mother, the narrator has trouble adjusting to this new reality: “I have never been able to let go of the idea that her problem is temporary.” Time may march forward, but the mind and heart can remain stuck in the past.
Relations between women have long fascinated Nunez. Several of her novels—including the excellent For Rouenna (2001), the flawed campus novel The Last of Her Kind (2006), and What Are You Going Through (2020), adapted for the screen in 2024 by Pedro Almodóvar—center on intense, complicated female friendships. But not since “Christa” has Nunez so deeply explored relationships between mothers and daughters. The title story, the last and strongest in the collection, links the narrator’s own experience of aging with that of her older friend Gilda, who was once a mother figure for the narrator. Gilda is now 89 and living in a senior housing complex, where she’s found herself a “beau,” a man who eschews hearing aids because he enjoys the humor of mishearing. “You ask someone for directions and they say, ‘That depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot,’” he jokes. The narrator listens to Gilda reminisce about the past and realizes she is “filling in the blanks with things she made up.” The narrator never corrects her older friend: “The point was for me to listen, not to set the record straight.”
Besides, the narrator, who appears to be Nunez’s alter ego, feels an affinity with Gilda:
I see in her the little novelist that sits in each of us busily working to arrange experience into story. The idea that a human life isn’t like a novel, that there is no plot, no narrative arc, that our memories can’t be relied on for shit, and that everything depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot—this the human heart will not have.
This is what passes for epiphany in Nunez’s short stories: not an earth-shattering insight or a neat resolution, but an honest reckoning with life’s absurdities. As in so much of her writing, Nunez presents us with a bleak vision but leavens it with humor, showing us how we, too, might cope with our nonsensical lives.
With this book, Nunez joins a tradition of writers who have used New York City and the proximities it demands as inspiration for their short fiction. One thinks of the New York stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, who was Nunez’s teacher at Barnard, and of certain stories by John Cheever, such as “The Enormous Radio,” in which a couple’s malfunctioning radio picks up conversations from neighboring apartments. Within Nunez’s generation, there’s Mary Gaitskill, whose groundbreaking collection Bad Behavior (1988) is largely set in the seamier sections of New York, and various members of the Brat Pack, who made the city seem at once glamorous and ruthless. Nunez’s New York, with its mix of intimacy and anonymity, is a less alienating environment, a place where one can fashion an interesting, imperfect life.
When she departs from the city, the stories are less successful. “Imagination,” set at a family’s summer home, follows Elsie, an adolescent girl gripped by the imp of the perverse. The story tries too hard to inhabit the teenage mind—there are text messages that no owner of a smartphone would countenance—and ends up being far from believable as a result. “The Plan,” which takes place largely on Long Island, is the opening section of a thriller that Nunez failed to sell. It has its moments, but it mostly serves as a reminder that Nunez isn’t as skilled at genre fiction as she is at something closer to realism. And “Airport Story,” set, as one might expect, in the liminal space of the airport, is a misanthropic portrait of humanity that seems more like a formal complaint than a work of short fiction.
But these are rare misses in a rich collection, one that showcases Nunez’s strengths. At her best, she is clear-eyed but not nihilistic, sharp but not entirely unfeeling. The women of her stories may have been wounded by life, but they never lose their curiosity, nor their humor. As they wander the city’s streets, keeping an eye out for those they know, they open themselves up to the kinds of adventures one has by accident. After all, they’d rather their lives be anything but boring: They know just how much depends on what the chimpanzee put in the pot.
