The man, again no names, just genders, is a well-known writer and university lecturer who has lived a big “L” life, full of womanising, marriages and grand ideas, many of which now seem quaintly and yet almost dangerously out of date in our far more conservative age. In The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, we are given a remarkably insightful, deeply-empathetic look deep into the slow and winding, and often unknowable process of grief, as a woman (no one is ever given names in the book) who functions as the observant narrator of the book, struggles to deal with the griefstricken aftermath of her close friend’s death to suicide.
The form it takes is as individual as the person grappling with it, a contrary beast that demands different things of different people, and which is never, ever left behind, though its impact and severity diminishes with time. There are many predictable, known things in this life but grief, alas, is not one of them.
(cover image courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
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