I was absolutely serious about ballet but only for a short time when I was in high school. I fell in love with ballet when I saw still photographs of dancers in Look magazine, and I decided to take classes. I loved the purity of it, the simplicity: these are the steps, this is how you do them. And I loved the discipline. The students were so young, just kids, and they would work and work and work without knowing whether they were ever going to make it. I can get very bitchy when I have grad students who seem completely relaxed about their writing, this thing they supposedly care about and hope to make a career of. I say, I’ve known twelve-year-olds who put more into a ballet class than you’ve put into this story.

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 anyone else. At one point I was planning to write about a relationship I’d had with someone many years before. This person had been my shrink, and we ended up together. But I found out that he’d since married and had children. Knowing this changed my mind. I couldn’t be sure how what I wrote might affect his family, and that was important to me. As Elizabeth Bishop said to Lowell after she read drafts of the poems in which he included quotes from Hardwick’s letters to him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.”

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 a gambling problem—thankfully it was not out of control, but it was real—and I wonder whether I inherited that. Because it really was a big gamble I was taking, and I suppose losing would have been terrible. Some people might call it optimism, but I’ve never been an optimistic person. I just refused to give up because I really, really wanted to write. One thing about gamblers is that they do not need to have confidence in order to keep going. They get off on thinking, I’m going to win this. And denial was also a part of it. As that shrink I was with used to say, denial is very useful. Without denial, you’d never be able to keep your head down and do the work.

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. What interested me most about the male mentor character in The Friend—far more than, say, the moral question of whether a professor should have an affair with a grad student—was what happens to the identity and self-esteem of such a person when he loses the power to seduce younger women, and when no one is interested in reading his work anymore. All of that contributes to that character’s not wanting to live. It’s much like the case of the very beautiful woman in What Are You Going Through whose identity is so wrapped up in what she looks like that her life is completely transformed when she becomes, merely by aging, not ugly but simply ordinary-looking.

I’m interested in what loss does to people. As you go through life, you lose so much, one thing after another. Some things are taken away from you, other things you’re forced to give up. And you lose loved ones. Parents, friends, animal companions. I’ve gotten a huge amount of mail from readers about the losses they’ve experienced.

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 surprisingly fast. I used to have the bad habit of saying, Oh, I couldn’t write this morning because of this or that, so I guess I won’t be writing today. Now I know that even if I can get in just one hour at whatever time of day it’s a good thing, because those hours add up. What’s important is to try to write at least a little each day, because then you’re living with the work, and even when you step away from it, it’s still part of what’s going on in your head.

INTERVIEWER

Does living alone help?

NUNEZ

Definitely. This is a hard thing to say, but it’s absolutely true—when I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing. Even when they were supportive, it didn’t matter—too much of my energy went into the relationship, the problems, the difficulties of trying to make things work. And not all of them were supportive—sometimes there was deliberate sabotage.