In It Will Come Back to You, Sigrid Nunez's wry, incisive 11th work (and first story collection), aging characters navigate volatile relationships and ponder memory and family legacies. All 13 stories originally appeared in literary magazines such as Harper's and the New Yorker.
Nunez (The Friend; The Vulnerables) has been deservedly lauded for her compassionate autofiction. A passenger is stranded in inhospitable circumstances in "Airport Story." Jury service unearths uncomfortable memories of an affair in "The Naked Juror." And in "Greensleeves," a woman laments her schizophrenic brother's behavior to a therapist, whose daughter is consumed by eco-anxiety.
Interest in other lives fuels epiphanies. Between college and law school, Phoebe lives in a crummy apartment building mostly occupied by immigrants; she wonders if her neighbor could be a sex worker in "Curiosity." Adolescent Elsie's impulsivity catches up with her in "Imagination" when she storms out of the farewell-to-summer party at her parents' country house, breaks her ankle, and startles a fox. The story ends on a delicious note of uncertainty.
Nostalgia and regret vie for position. The title story offers a melancholy end to the book as the narrator accepts hearing loss and interrogates her memories of her mother figure, 89-year-old "Aunt" Gilda. There are flashes of humor, too--chiefly in "It's All Good," in which a brother and sister hire a Brad Pitt impersonator to entertain their mother, who has dementia, at a Chinese restaurant.
Comparable to works by Elizabeth Strout and Deborah Levy, It Will Come Back to You is a captivating collection that resonates with themes of human vulnerability, memory triggers, generational patterns, and facing shame and bitterness. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck