Sigrid Nunez’s books do not scream movie adaptation, with their journal-like first-person intimacy and homebody settings. In her 2018 National Book Award winner, The Friend, a writing professor takes care of her mentor’s dog after his death. In What Are You Going Through, from 2021, a writer accompanies an old friend who plans to kill herself. Each feels like a conversation with a smart, honest friend, her mind full of quotations, with a natural flow that one worries a movie could botch.
Not so for Nunez, who approved two new adaptations. “I already knew that I was going to say yes, because why not?” she says with her bluff sense of humor and curiosity.
