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BERLIN

We stay in the apartment of a Croatian couple, husband and wife, both in love with our friend M.,
a professional flautist, long-fingered and heron-legged. They’ve gone to Zagreb to witness a mother’s death.
For the duration, my husband and I walk their mutt, Streetboy, in Tempelhof F…

INTERVIEWER

What do you need in order to write?

NUNEZ

Just the time and the quiet. I write on my laptop at my desk, or really anywhere in the apartment but the bed. I get up at six or seven, and I work until I’m tired—on a good day that’s for four or five hours, and they go by surprisingl…

There is some poet—it might have been Lowell—who said about his writing, “I want to break your heart.” There’s an arrogance in that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone! But I do have faith that, anytime I’m sharing a moment of true feeling, it will be recognizable to the reader. W…

People often ask me how I could have lived all those years as I did, so precariously. Meaning putting all my hopes in a literary career, never having a job to fall back on, and not having a family. If writing didn’t work out, what kind of life would I have? I sometimes think about how my father had…

As Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm and many others have suggested, what writers do when they write about other people is often unconscionable. People normally don’t want you to write about them, and if you decide you’re going to do it anyway, the important thing is not to lie about it, to yourself or…