I have never felt so inside the head of a writer as I did while reading this book. In fact I was so confused by the blurring of autobiography and fiction, (a confusion I found somewhat pleasurable, I might add) that I wanted to write this entry before reading any of the reviews about the author or book so I could preserve the immediacy of my impressions. Even seeing the author’s picture at the end of the novel was somehow a distraction.

Nunez deliberately lays out this path of blurred boundaries with clues along the way. In Part Eleven, an extra-diagetic chapter where she describes her fantasy ending to the novel, and gives us another version of the “true story”, she comments: “She tells the man about a new course she’s teaching. Life and Story. Fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction.” This course is the novel. The novel is the course.

The book does have a plot. The narrator, a writer, has learned that her good friend and mentor has committed suicide. His wife has asked if she will take in his Great Dane. The dog is also grieving the death of his owner, and makes terrible sobbing sounds when left alone. The narrator lives in a rent-controlled small apartment where dogs are not allowed. But she cannot say no, and takes the dog in. He soon takes over her bed and her heart and her life. The only character in the novel with a name is the dog, Apollo.

The narrator-writer sees literary references in all her thoughts and experiences, and beautifully interweaves these references in the story in a way that seems utterly relevant and not heavy handed. From Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: “‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.’ Words often quoted, or paraphrased, including recently in an epigraph to the film White God: Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”

I am not a writer and it is not my sole passion to make sense of my experiences by committing them to words. The act of writing this blog is the closest I come to that struggle, which gives you some idea of how far away I really am. But Nunez brings the reader along in her struggle. Every moment is a literary moment; expansive, considered, connected through language to other stories. What is the truth and what is fiction becomes irrelevant to the larger project of observing and writing and trying to find meaning in life and art.