A roommate of one's own
Sigrid Nunez's new novel imagines two college students' powerful friendship
By Emily Bobrow
Reprinted from Time Out New York In The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez's fifth and most powerful novel, Georgette George is writing the story of her life. No longer young, she is reliving her memories. She does not consult her personal journals to verify the facts; the point is the remembering. She begins her story on the Barnard campus in 1968, where she meets Dooley "Ann" Drayton, her roommate and, in many ways, her opposite. Brilliant and combative, Ann loathes her own wealthy Connecticut background. "I wish I had been poor," Ann declares, believing the white "haves" of the world are responsible for all of its problems. For Georgette, who comes to Barnard on scholarship, in academic exile from the "savage world of the north country poor," Ann is compelling and repellent—an earnest believer in righting the world's wrongs, and a spoiled ingrate who is cruel to her parents. And so begins their potent, lopsided friendship, against the chaotic backdrop of college in the late '60s. This is a place where "rich kids lamented not being poor and made a fetish of poor blacks; where blacks claimed that no white teacher could criticize a black student's work and…where Charles Manson was a hero, or at least 'one of us.'" Everything is in flux. And there is suddenly a lot of sex, drugs and rock & roll, laced with romantic ideas of emancipation. Nunez, who also began studying at Barnard in 1968 (though unlike Ann and Georgette, did not drop out), artfully captures the energy and absurdity of this moment, when everything felt fresh and important.
"We really believed that we were going to change the world, and that all it took was love," Nunez says over coffee in Chelsea. Though not from upstate New York, Nunez's circumstances, like Georgette's, were underprivileged; she came to Barnard via the Staten Island projects, the first-generation child of immigrants. On the Ivy League campus, she met people from the upper class for the first time. And while the ethos of the era encouraged a greater mixing of classes and races than ever before (and perhaps since), it was clear to Nunez that she spoke a different language and needed to learn some different rules. "I've never written anything that hasn't been informed by that experience," she says.
Georgette writes about her university years wistfully but with the clarity of distance. Though a product of her time, and into drugs and free love, she was never fooled by the hot air of campus revolutionaries. Set against the real hardship of her own background, such blather about "the bourgeoisie dictating consciousness" seemed hardly astute. But as she muses on the decades that follow—years that carry her through two failed marriages and that see Ann charged with murder—it is hard for her not to mourn the erosion of that 1960s optimism, and to dread the dis-illusionment that takes its place.
Nunez's work is populated by narrators who spend their time looking back, making sense of what has passed. "So much of life is about loss," she explains. "You lose your childhood, you lose your friends along the way. And you can have a kind of nostalgia, a yearning, for times when you weren't even happy." Georgette's story follows a loose chronology, with Ann always casting a long shadow ("It is no exaggeration to say I have never stopped thinking about her," she writes). Nourished by her memories, she feels entitled to jump around, using later experiences to help explain earlier ones, and applying the wisdom of the present to the angst of the past.
Georgette also writes about the fulfillment of motherhood and the gifts of being a parent. She is so convincing that it is startling to discover that Nunez doesn't have children herself. "I always wanted to have children," she says. "I've always been aware that I missed something. When you write, you get to do things—adventurous things, scary things and beautiful things—that you missed in life." When asked if all the colorful scenes about drugs were also a vicarious exercise, she responds with a laugh: "That I did. I didn't miss that." |
