What Are You Going Through

UPDATE: worth rereading. So I did. What an exquisite voice. What a beautiful book. I can't say what it's about, any more than I can say what life is about, only that it's a meandering, disjointed path touching on loneliness, communication, relationships, aging, memory, listening. The first-person narration is almost ethereal: we learn almost nothing of her, she goes through life taking up very little space but missing out on little. The whole book is her observations on interactions with others, with a big ghostly gap where we'd usually have an active character. Somehow, by hiding the person, Nuñez highlights the ways in which we navigate our lives, how we learn (or don't), grow (ditto), come to peace with ourselves. Nuñez paints behaviors I recognize, in myself and in people I love and in people I avoid, and she has me thinking about who I want to be.

[Original review: Probably not the best book to read on a painful flight home from a memorial for someone who, four months ago, did not know he had cancer. I kept going anyway: maybe the Universe had a message for me? (No, of course I don't believe that stupid shit. But I do believe in learning from every opportunity that's handed to me. And learn I did. But I don't think I can write about this book right now.)]

I felt that this book could've been a bit shorter. There are a lot of tangents, and at times it felt like I was listening to an older relative tell a story with no clear point.