by Sigrid Nunez
First published 2001
A writer receives a letter from Rouenna Zycinski, someone she knew as a child in the same housing project. Rouenna wants to meet after decades apart. When they reconnect, Rouenna shares stories from her time as a combat nurse in Vietnam. She asks the writer to help her create a memoir of those experiences. The writer refuses the collaboration request. Then Rouenna dies suddenly. The shocking loss changes everything for the writer. She finds herself compelled to tell Rouenna's story anyway. Writing about her friend becomes an obsession that consumes her daily life. The project transforms from something she rejected into her only source of comfort. Through reconstructing Rouenna's war experiences, the writer grapples with questions about memory and truth. The act of writing becomes both a burden she cannot escape and the one thing that helps her process grief.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: grief, obsession, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Vietnam
Period: 20th-century
208 pages · Hardcover · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: death