Sigrid Nunez is most known to Woolfians for Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, her 1998 (and reissued in 2019) fictional portrait of the Woolfs’ pet monkey, inspired by Flush, Virginia Woolf’s similar treatment of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog.

Bloomsbury makes a brief appearance in her new novel, What Are You Going Through, a series of musings, meetings and memories. The nameless narrator follows some anecdotes about the divisions between women and men by reflecting that while she doesn’t like romance fiction, she’s fascinated by stories of unconventional or hopeless love. She imagines a collection of these tales, called Women in Strange Love.

She considers Dora Carrington’s unrequited love and devotion to Lytton Strachey, her marriage to Ralph Partridge and their lopsided ménage à trois to accommodate Lytton’s passion for Ralph. She recaps Carrington’s suicide two months after Lytton’s death. Virginia Woolf visited Carrington the day before and recounted that she said, “There is nothing left for me to do; I did everything for Lytton.” Woolf’s parting impression of Carrington was “Like some small animal left.”

“Women’s stories are often sad stories,” observes the narrator.

Nunez novel reflects on women’s lives—friendship, aging and death—in the context of the narrator’s response to a friend with terminal cancer. The title is a translation from Simone Weil, who said that love of one’s neighbor is being able to ask the question, Que lest ton tourment?