THE VULNERABLES

Sigrid Nunez. THE VULNERABLES. Riverhead, 2023. 

A friend gifted me this book saying it was "more my style" than hers. And she is right. I came to suspect that this writer has been reading my drafts--novels and memoir. She has a section called Interlude while I just finished a section called Intermission in my memoir. 

Although presented as a novel, it really feels like a memoir. So convincing, the voice of the unnamed narrator, a writer experiencing writer's block, during the lockdown, while bird-sitting a pet parrot Eureka and his friend, a troubled youth she calls Vetch.

This is the first COVID lockdown story I have read. It brought back memories, and challenged some of the American experience which seemed different from ours. But I most enjoy the way the writer has made something out of nothing, and the glimpses she gives us into the writer's brain, filled with inspirational quotations from other writers and speculation about why we do what we do.