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In Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, about a woman caring for her dying friend, the author references Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s 2015 documentary No Home Movie. Nunez writes, “Akerman documented conversations with her mother during the last months of her mother’s life. We should all be great filmmakers.”
It’s a line that feels particularly striking now that two of Nunez’s novels are being adapted for the screen. What Are You Going Through serves as the basis for The Room Next Door, directed by Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar. Simultaneously, her 2018 National Book Award-winning work The Friend is now a movie starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, directed by the duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Both films are playing at the Toronto International Film Festival after debuting at Venice and Telluride respectively, making Nunez perhaps the hottest writer of the fall movie season, three decades into her career which has produced 10 books, and accolades including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
“I just feel like the luckiest writer in the world right now,” she says in a phone interview just shortly after she had seen The Room Next Door for the first time, the day before TIFF began. “Those books were obviously very meaningful to me and I have these two beautiful interpretations, creations, works of art that I didn’t have to do anything [on]. My vision gave some other really gifted people a vision. I’m just thrilled.”
Nunez’s two stories are thematically similar. The Friend follows a writer, named Iris and played on screen by Watts, grieving the loss of her friend (Murray), a mentor figure who died by suicide. In his absence his third wife (Noma Dumezweni) asks his dear confidant to take care of the dog he left behind, an enormous Harlequin Great Dane named Apollo, who is also in mourning and who is not allowed in her cramped New York apartment. Both the film and the novel tackle how people cope in the face of great loss, and how we interpret and…
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