A woman looks back on how her younger self enjoyed the highs and endured the lows of first love. Her high school sweetheart was Ace, who was two years older than her and drove a Chevy convertible. Their English teacher, Mrs. Mint, flirted with him in class and often repeated that he resembled James Dean. Ace proved to be a rebel with a cause: He went off to war in Vietnam. After his tour of duty, he never got in touch with the girl he left behind. Instead, he got together with Mrs. Mint, and the pair went on to have a child. But then calamity struck. The woman grasps that both Ace and Mrs. Mint were forced to learn the hard way, just like she did, that some disasters and disappointments can’t be overcome, only accepted.
“Philosophers,” a deft tale about a slice of life and twists of fate, kickstarts Sigrid Nunez’s first book of short stories. Some readers may assume that Nunez has just turned her hand to short fiction: With the exception of a memoir of Susan Sontag, 2011’s Sempre Susan, her published books to date have consisted of nine novels, including The Friend, which won the 2018 National Book Award. But Nunez has been contributing stories to various periodicals for three decades, and she has cherry-picked 13 of them for It Will Come Back to You. Technically, this makes the book not so much “Collected Stories,” as advertised, but rather “Selected Stories,” but these select few, dating from 1992 to 2025, are finely crafted potted dramas and miniature portraits.
The book’s second story, “Greensleeves,” begins with a woman on a couch telling a male therapist about sinister voices in her head and crazy people on the subway. Just as we settle into what appears to be an exchange between a shrink and his patient, Nunez pans out to reveal not a private office but a party in full swing. The bored therapist is not sure why he has come along: He barely knows the host, and the guests are “not people he needed to get to know.” As the woman airs her thoughts and demons, the therapist’s mind drifts to more important matters: His wife has recently left him, and their daughter is depressed. Later, when the woman goes home with him and opens up about her brother’s illness, he notices there is “an intensity, almost a radiance, about her,” and his spirits lift at seeing her in this new light.
Another story with a party setting revolves around a character who isn’t such a quiet listener. “Imagination” immediately lives up to its title. Fourteen-year-old Elsie watches a guest arrive at her parents’ annual summer party. After taking stock of his appearance (“furry eyebrows like mice hunched above his sheer cliff of a nose”), her mind becomes more creative, and she visualizes him shape-shifting into a dog. Elsie is inventive, but her parents view her as disruptive. Her oddball antics and “poor impulse control” — unrestrained screams, laughs, and yawns get her into trouble at school and at home — lead her mother to warn her not to do anything “perverse” at the party. Elsie can’t manage that and makes a “spectacle” of herself. “Are you really that desperate for attention?” her mother asks. But later that night, Elsie has an accident and needs urgent help. Chastened and afraid, she is faced with a quandary: Does she cry out — and potentially cry wolf — when she’s been told not to, or does she suffer in silence?
This isn’t the only tale here that deals with mother-daughter relations; one story is even titled “Mother-Daughter Story,” and it turns out to be exactly that. But “Imagination” is one of the few that, for all its flights of fancy, is at heart a serious story, about a young girl who is desperate for attention, and affection, from her distant parents.
In contrast, “It’s All Good” sees Nunez scrutinizing a familial bond in a more blackly comic fashion. A brother and sister take their dementia-addled mother to a Chinese restaurant to celebrate her birthday. Since she has recently developed a crush on Brad Pitt, the brother hires a lookalike of the actor to join them for lunch. Nunez injects humor at various turns, from the caliber of the Brad impersonator to the mother’s potty mouth to the bad name for her assisted living residence (“What would you rather they call it? Gaga Gardens? Grim Reaper Row?”). Offsetting the hijinks are weightier moments, such as glimpses of how the siblings have forged a close alliance amid their mother’s decline. As the daughter says, “There is something worse than your mother not knowing who you are, and that is your mother not knowing who you are and freaking out when she sees you.”
As with most collections, not every story sparkles. The two shortest offerings constitute mere thumbnail sketches. Both need a vital redeeming quality — a riotous streak, a surprise turn, a sting in the tale — but without it, they are inconsequential and prevent the book from feeling like a “greatest hits” package.
Still, the other 11 stories delight and occasionally stimulate. The longest story chills. “The Plan” is the least representative of Nunez’s work and is all the better for being cast in a different mold. It follows a man as he roams New York City weighing up “candidates” to murder. However, he already has one person in his sights: his wife. For him, killing her will be a “correction.” Nunez conveys an atmosphere of queasy dread and leaves her reader wondering if evil will prevail.
HAROLD BLOOM AND HIS POET-CORRESPONDENTS
In the book’s strongest stories, we marvel when Nunez’s limpid prose ripples with novel descriptions and phrasings: the oxblood interior of a car looks like “a gutted shark”; a white curtain blows in and out “like the veil of a dithering bride.” Passages are routinely elevated by wry insight: “There was the kind of person who said, Let’s split the check, and the kind who reminded you you’d had the extra beer.”
In the book’s title story, Nunez returns to reexamine remembering and forgetting. Her narrator is preoccupied with “why memory is so easily overruled by fiction, and why it can be so hard, no matter how we struggle, to get at the truth of our lives.” Here and elsewhere, Nunez illuminates some of that truth.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.