“The reader,” says National Book Award-winner Sigrid Nunez, “will forgive the novelist certain things. Like, in a 400-page book, you can have a dozen flat sentences. But in a [short] story? No. You can’t.”
In this exchange, Nunez is addressing the semantic density of short fiction—an issue she has been weighing as she gears up for her first collection of stories, It Will Come Back to You, which Riverhead will publish on July 14.
“I finished writing The Vulnerables,” she notes about her 2023 novel, “and then, in a moment that felt unusual for me, a novel idea for a story appeared, I wrote it, and I felt pleased with it. That doesn’t usually happen. And then,” she adds, “quite unexpectedly, I had another one. And another one. And one more.” As a result, a cluster of stories formed—many of them penned only recently.
With a bit of prodding from her agent, that streak of momentum convinced Nunez to salvage the start of an unpublished novel and a handful of older pieces that had endured without edits. “If something’s already published,” she explains, “ revisiting and altering it feels odd. And I don’t think I’d enjoy doing it.”
Enjoyment, for Nunez, matters enormously in how she crafts prose. There isn’t a single through-line in It Will Come Back to You, not in the conventional sense, but on the level of language the collection resembles a mosaic of quirky, puzzle-like paragraphs. From these blocks emerge latent themes—the oddity of human society, the depth of emotional isolation, and the importance of creativity. The artistry is especially visible in how the book opens introductions to characters—an essential skill in short fiction—where personalities must be memorable enough to track yet precise enough not to disrupt pacing.
The first portrait we meet is Ace, a love interest in “Philosophers,” who “often began sentences with some variant of There are two kinds of people in the world.” Ace’s instructor thinks he “looked like James Dean, which wasn’t actually true, even if she was really speaking about his aura.”
This instructor, Mrs. Mint, “was a dissatisfied woman with stylishly tousled hair and prominent features that drew attention. Her aura belonged to a wife whose husband had married her for those breasts and had since grown weary of them.”
Later, in “It’s All Good,” the narrator dials a nursing-home supervisor—described as “not easy to speak with, though she’s about as old as my mother and as sharp as a tack, with pale, watery eyes that look as if a headache is gathering behind them, and a precious, aloof manner that makes you fear an alarm would go off if you leaned in too close.”
“I don’t understand why people don’t seem to remember what it was like to be that age. They say they do, but they don’t behave that way. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”
Not every character lands with such force. Yet it’s striking how Nunez constructs these opening portraits, each one a contained bit of Borgesian flash fiction. “I think a lot depends on serendipity,” she confesses when asked what makes for a memorable flaw. “I’m writing along and I mention something about the character, and it just occurs to me to describe her that way in the first draft. If it feels right, I keep it. Or it will pop up in later drafts.”
(As is often the case when probing how great writers work, a straightforward explanation can feel elusive. “It will come to me.”)
“It’s never something I want to pause over and strain for,” she says about drafting characters. “If it doesn’t arise naturally, it’s too contrived. But you can’t rely on minor details like a name or eye color or height alone. You need a concrete detail about them. And you only need one if it’s strong.”
Nunez’s method here leans more on imagination than technique, a trait that aligns with the collection’s third story, appropriately titled: “Imagination,” which opens with the line: “In walked Dick Franz with his look of a warlock….”
First published in The Sun in 2012, “Imagination”—whether intentionally or not—offers a window into Nunez’s creative engine. Its protagonist is a whimsical teenage girl named Elsie, drifting dreamily through a party at her parents’ country house.
“An inventive imagination was a gift from the gods,” Nunez writes, “or a curse if you couldn’t control it. Elsie would sometimes begin a tale and let it spiral, talking at length and chasing tangents until it felt as if she were speaking in tongues. If you pointed this out to her, she would clam up.”
Nunez says she still vividly recalls what it felt like to be a teenager. “I’m always surprised by how adults treat young people as if they understand everything,” she remarks. “I don’t understand why people forget what it was like to be that age. They claim they remember, but they don’t act that way. They’ve forgotten everything.”
As an example, she notes the typical teen fixation on appearances, such as Elsie’s fascination with the evening’s bartender in his thirties. “Not old enough to be her father, but close,” Nunez writes. “[Elsie] tries to picture herself at that age. Would she have been as pretty then as she is now? More so? (Probably not.)”
There’s a kind of narcissism to youth, Nunez observes, but it isn’t inherently unhealthy. It’s part of discovering oneself and deciding how one will be seen. Life can feel like an impending disaster, yet it’s also thrilling and exhilarating.
Perhaps fiction writers bear a heavier burden of adolescence than most people. “I think they probably do,” Nunez agrees. “Being able to access what you were like as a child is one of the greatest tools a writer can have. Brain surgeons need to be very mature, after all.”
Nunez, as befits her subject matter, is high on today’s crop of young authors.
The later pieces in the collection lean on the wisdom that comes with age, with three stories in particular offering sharp reflections; most striking is “The Rabbit’s Foot,” published last year in The Yale Review. Here Carmine, a worn-down maid in a posh New York hotel, is later judged by her Ivy-educated daughter for having been taken advantage of as a young woman. Nunez says the setting drew inspiration from Sherman Alexie’s 2017 New Yorker story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest.” Beyond the setting and a sense of forward time shift, she began drafting the piece and then let it unfold spontaneously.
“I usually just write my way into things,” she explains of her plotting. She believes that “most of the stories in this collection likely changed course in the middle of writing,” which is hardly surprising given the nature of composing on the page, yet it also mirrors what she has said before about leaving space for wandering bursts of inspiration.
“It just comes to me…
“It’s never something that I want to pause and struggle with…”
A reluctance to plot might lead toward a certain type of story, one punctuated by Elsie’s celebrated digressions—“piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents.” Yet Nunez avoids that trap with a resolve rooted in craft. Once she starts drafting a short story, she says, “I make every effort to finish it. I would never begin another one while I’m still drafting; I start, and I want to complete it as quickly as I can.”
Nunez has heard of writers who juggle multiple projects at once, laying down a partial manuscript while beginning another and weaving in essays and stories. “That’s very foreign to me,” she says. “I need a focused, narrow approach and as few drafts as possible.”
With that frame, it’s unsurprising that the protagonist of the collection’s titular piece laments today’s battles with attention, calling it “a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”
“It’s very worrying,” she adds. “Technology is troubling for many reasons. We know there’s some damage to memory and focus, though the specifics remain unclear.”
The narrator of It Will Come Back to You wonders whether younger generations are more affected than older ones. Yet, in keeping with the book’s theme, Nunez remains hopeful about today’s young authors. Regardless of the distractions that affect contemporary novelists, she argues, “I don’t think it’s a widespread problem, and it certainly doesn’t mean the quality of work is deteriorating. It isn’t as if bad writers have suddenly become all we have. That could hardly be farther from the truth.”
