![]() ![]() But in my book, I made the president a woman. In my book, the president of the United States is just one of millions who are infected, as of course happened to Trump. As it turns out, many things that I describe in that book actually came to pass with Covid. I also write about the effects of global warming in Salvation City. I wanted to imagine what it would be like for a kid to lose both parents after becoming extremely ill himself. William Maxwell lost his mother then and never got over it. Also, I knew that many children were orphaned during the Great Flu, the writer Mary McCarthy among them. I wanted to imagine what a crisis of that magnitude might be like in a polarized and in so many ways dysfunctional country like the US. I thought it was more than likely that a global pandemic would occur during my lifetime. Fauci and other experts-not a question of if but when. Sigrid Nunez: With Salvation City, I’d known for a long time that another pandemic like the Great Flu of 1918 was-according to Dr. Jane Ciabattari: You also wrote about a pandemic in your 2010 novel Salvation City. Were you influenced by earlier authors who wrote about the plagues/pandemics of their time, like Katherine Anne Porter, whose Pale Horse, Pale Rider is drawn from her own experience surviving the Spanish flu of 1918? I wanted to imagine what a crisis of that magnitude might be like in a polarized and in so many ways dysfunctional country like the US. You’re always worried that what you find funny might fall flat for other people.” I was particularly pleased that my agent and my editor and other people who’ve read the book so far have appreciated the humor in the novel. I finished it before showing it to anyone. So I began writing about was happening right at that moment-to me, to all of us-and sometime later I took those pages and went on writing, and that turned into The Vulnerables. ![]() Each of us was asked to read briefly and I decided to write something new just for the reading. Then it came time for the annual spring faculty reading at BU, where I’d been teaching. “I did manage to finish a long review essay. “Like so many other writers, at the outbreak of Covid and in the early days of lockdown-not to mention the ongoing mad, bad behavior of our political leadership-I was too stunned to get much writing done,” she responded. How did the pandemic affect the writing of The Vulnerables? I asked Nunez via email, each of us on a different coast. “To be the only pedestrian for blocks, to have an acre of Central Park to yourself.” “…I couldn’t help feeling guilty about the pleasure I took in the lifeless streets,” she writes. Later she nails it again: “…and weren’t we all sick of hearing it: uncertainty was the only uncertainty to be had.” The Vulnerables, which follows the 2018 National Book Award-winning The Friend and What Are You Going Through (2020), is Nunez’s ode to this strange historic moment-to survival, community, random connection, and even isolation. "To me, Stephen was my husband and the father of my children one does not say to one's husband, 'Oh, you're so clever! I must worship the ground under your feet, or in this case, wheels.' I found this kind of sycophantic attitude-the attitude adopted by so many people around Stephen-exceptionally frustrating and, of course, it grew a lot worse when we finally had to engage carers.Sigrid Nunez opens her ninth novel with the first line in Virginia Woolf’s The Years: “It was an uncertain spring.” Not surprisingly, given the rigor with which Nunez approaches language, it’s an acutely accurate description of the early pandemic months in New York City she describes in The Vulnerables, when it wasn’t clear how COVID-19 originated, how it spread, and how to protect yourself. "I rather felt that the family had been left behind," she told Radio Times in 2014, according to the Independent. ![]() They had three children together: Lucy, Timothy and Robert. Hawking brought science to the masses when his book, A Brief History of Time, was published in 1988-but that's when things became complicated for his family. Previously, however, she opened up in 2014 when The Theory of Everything, a bio-pic about Hawking's life, was released in theaters. Though his children issued a statement, his ex-wife, Jane Wilde, did not immediately speak out. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking died at age 76 on Tuesday. ![]()
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