In the past eleven years, Sigrid Nunez has written five novels, all of which are subtle investigations of how one’s identity is forged in that space between what is known, or can be known, and what is withheld. It’s a fitting project for a novelist whose name simultaneously reveals and conceals her background. Her name hints at a dual heritage—she is the daughter of a German mother and part-Panamanian father—but it doesn’t reflect her father’s Chinese roots nor the Eastern culture that plays such an important role in her life. In her most recent novel, The Last of Her Kind, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month, Nunez continues her exploration of identity through the characters of Dooley Ann Drayton and Georgette George, two young women who meet as roommates at Barnard College in 1968, to form a relationship that Nunez calls “a kind of temporary arranged marriage.”

With the assertion that there are “no innocent white people,” Ann rejects her privileged upbringing in Connecticut, starting with her given name, Dooley, which she sees as a “shameful” reminder that her family is descended from Southern plantation owners. She believes in complete openness as both personal credo and political ideology. She says, “In a truly enlightened and just society there would be no secrets.” The more sheltered Georgette—the first of her working class family to attend college—struggles with feeling like an outsider. She arms herself with a motto, “Don’t let the pack know you’re wounded,” which helps her resist her instinct “to wound or kill any one of that number…who made me feel helpless, humiliated, afraid.” Ann reveals; Georgette conceals. Or so it seems.

The Last of Her Kind, which was chosen as an alternate selection for the Book of the Month Club, and has received strong reviews prior to its publication, traces the unlikely and uneasy friendship of these two women—one committed to radical social change, the other choosing a more conventional life—in the late ’60s, the years marked by the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Woodstock, the Black Panthers, and the infamous Rolling Stones performance at Altamont. Using this tumultuous time as a backdrop, Nunez confronts big questions of moral complexity, the arrogant underside of idealism, the shifting line between principles and fanaticism, and America’s fascination with violence. The Last of Her Kind focuses not only on the kind of violence unleashed by a declaration of war, or fired from the barrel of a gun, but also on the more intimate violence of suppressed anger and missed opportunities between husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and lovers.

Nunez has been winning literary prizes and enjoying prestigious teaching appointments for years with surprisingly little fanfare. The recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a residency from the Lannan Foundation, she was the Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome from 2000 to 2001. In 2003, she was elected a Literature Fellow by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and last spring she won a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. She has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, and Columbia University. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and serves as a mentor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Nunez is currently teaching in the graduate writing program at the New School in Manhattan. Starting this spring, she will be a visiting writer at Washington University in St. Louis.

While her responsibilities as a teacher keep her busy, Nunez says she finds time to write every day. “It’s not such a difficult balance for me because I only teach part-time, I don’t have a family, and I live by myself. I want to be writing all the time,” she says. “Even as a little kid, I wanted to be a writer. I thought I’d grow up to be a children’s book writer. I wanted to be Dr. Seuss. So, every job I’ve ever had has been to support my writing habit.”

Her list of honors, awards, and teaching gigs is impressive by any writer’s standards, but it’s especially so for one who grew up in a household where neither parent was entirely comfortable with English—neither spoke the other’s language, and neither the father nor the mother tried to teach their daughter his or her native Chinese or German, an omission Nunez has described as “a terrible withholding.” But it was English—her perfectly spoken, beautifully written English—that she used in 1968 as her passport to Barnard College in Manhattan, a place that might as well have been a continent away from the projects on Staten Island where she grew up in the 1950s.

Nunez chronicled her childhood and adolescence in her first book, A Feather on the Breath of God, which was originally published by HarperCollins in 1995, and was recently reissued in paperback by Picador. Although technically a novel, it resembles a memoir, with telltale signs that the material is made up of nonfiction as well as fiction. Nunez calls it “my real hybrid genre book. Even though there are parts that are based on my parents, with little distance between author and narrative, it isn’t really a memoir, because there’s a sufficient amount of distortion and invention.”

A Feather on the Breath of God fits her description of the hybrid, which she says combines elements from more than one genre to form a book that is “part novel, part history, part journal, part travel book, part essay.” In this case, Nunez fuses fiction with autobiographical details. Thus, her depiction of her parents’ backgrounds is, she says, “totally accurate.”

Whether it’s the truth of fact or memory or imagination, what is most striking is the book’s depiction of silence in an impoverished household, where the German war bride wishes for blond-haired, blue-eyed children and the Chinese Panamanian father remains mute, possibly, the narrator finally realizes, “not as one who would not speak but as one to whom no one would listen.”

A Feather on the Breath of God met with both critical and commercial success. Reviewers called it “beautifully honed” and “haunting and alluring,” with a “tone-poem-like quality.” Parts of it have appeared in anthologies of Asian-American literature; it was a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award. And it received the Asian American Studies Award for best novel of the year. Nunez doubts that many would classify her as an Asian American writer, and she recognizes that there is some measure of peculiarity in her winning this award. However, she points out that it was given for specific portions of the book, “especially the part called ‘Chang,’ about my half-Chinese father and his identity as a Chinese American,” she says. “This is one aspect of my life and my life as a writer, so it makes sense to me for it to be recognized as part of that [Asian American] literature.”

Nunez credits Elizabeth Hardwick, her undergraduate professor at Barnard College, for her interest in the hybrid genre. Although influenced more by her writing than her teaching, Nunez says that Hardwick, the author of the essay collection Seduction and Betrayal (Random House, 1974) and the novel Sleepless Nights (Random House, 1979), made an indelible impression. “So there she was, the first writing teacher I ever had, the first writer I ever met. But ultimately I was so drawn to her prose—it’s exquisite.” Nunez found herself imitating Hardwick, who is known for her witty and sophisticated essays, as well as for autobiographical fiction, but, Nunez says, “that’s when I was young, and, of course, it came out badly.”

After graduating with a degree in English from Barnard, in 1972, Nunez worked as an editorial assistant for the New York Review of Books before enrolling in the MFA program at Columbia University. She admits that she never found the creative writing workshops there to be “particularly inspiring.” Now a teacher herself, she says she begins each workshop by telling her students that “they will learn far more from reading other writers than they ever could in a writing class.”

In The Last of Her Kind, Nunez writes a scathing indictment of the traditional workshop scenario in her description of Georgette’s poetry workshop at Barnard. The teacher tells students to omit their names from their work so they can talk more honestly about them, “without personalities getting in the way.” Georgette knows, however, that “she might as well have said, So that you can be as tactless and brutal as you wish.” The class star’s “dragon hiss of contempt” is deadly to Georgette, and it kills more than her desire to write poetry: “That class helped set things in motion, coloring my attitude toward all my other classes, toward being in college in general, intensifying my fear of not belonging, of not speaking the same language as everyone else—a language I might be capable of learning enough to get by, but in which I would never be fluent.” As in much of Nunez’s fiction, the scene contains a kernel of truth. “I don’t think it’s that uncommon,” Nunez says. “I did indeed have an experience like that. I remember it very well, and now the things I didn’t like in workshop are what I as a teacher won’t do.”

After receiving her MFA from Columbia, in 1975, Nunez returned to the New York Review of Books, where she met another influence on her work, the late Susan Sontag, who was at that time a regular contributor to the magazine and was recovering from her first bout with cancer. “She was getting herself back on her feet after surgery and had this big pile of correspondence,” Nunez explains. “She asked that the Review get someone to help with the typing. I lived on 106th Street, near her apartment on Riverside Drive, so I started going over to help her. That’s when I meet David Rieff, her son, and we ended up together. The three of us lived in the same apartment in the late 1970s. After David and I broke up, I saw Susan only occasionally.”

Sontag introduced Nunez to the work of writers and artists, especially those from Europe, such as poet Rainer Maria Rilke and novelist Milan Kundera, whose work, she says, “helped shape my intellectual development. Sontag’s attitude of high seriousness toward literature and her exalted view of the writer’s vocation struck deep chords in me.” Nunez cites Sontag’s story “Project for a Trip to China,” an example of the hybrid genre, as being particularly influential on her early work.

After A Feather on the Breath of God, Nunez decided to write a traditional novel, one that drew more from the author’s imagination than from her autobiography. Naked Sleeper (HarperCollins, 1996), which centers on Nona, a writer and teacher whose marriage is in crisis, garnered generally positive reviews, but it did not receive the high praise of her first book. She followed that up with a third novel, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (HarperFlamingo, 1998), a “mock biography” of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet marmoset. Nunez calls it a “jeu d’esprit,” and says the book was inspired by Flush, Virginia Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. More whimsical than her earlier works, Mitz is, by Nunez’s own description, “in the hybrid genre because it contained more nonfiction than fiction. I wanted to tell the story of their lives during that period [the autumn of the Bloomsbury era]. They really had this monkey, and I used authentic Bloomsbury documents—Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries, biographies, her husband’s autobiography—in order to create what is a completely historically accurate document of those times. But, of course, it’s about a monkey, so I had to invent a certain amount to make the story interesting.”

For Rouenna, Nunez’s next novel, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2001, was seen by many as her breakthrough work, garnering enthusiastic reviews. One, in the Women’s Review of Books, written by Suzanne Ruta, called the book the product of “a gifted author finding her subject, her mission and her full voice, all in the same place.” In the book, Nunez explores the character of Rouenna Zycinski, a former U.S. Army nurse who served in Vietnam. She is a composite, Nunez says, of various people she’s known. Rouenna writes a letter to an author—the book’s narrator—after she reads her novel and realizes that the two of them grew up in the same housing project. Alternately drawn to and repelled by this woman, now middle-aged and grossly overweight, the author-narrator decides, after Rouenna commits suicide, to tell her story. What follows is a kind of metafiction that is as much about the author-narrator as about Rouenna.

But then, most of Nunez’s writing seems to be about the narrator—or the writer. Her rich fictional lives often more closely resemble Nunez’s own life than is apparent during the first read. Even the narrator of Mitz, set in the 1930s, refers to contemporary events and figures, such as the 1995 film Carrington and critic Harold Bloom, and reviewers have noted Mitz’s “shared characteristics” with Nunez herself. Among the “dazzling possibilities” that the hybrid genre affords her, Nunez says, is the narrative opportunity to invest more of herself and her history into her characters’ lives. With each succeeding book, Nunez discloses more of herself, and at the same time she obscures, or just plain ignores, the line between fact and fiction.

In the new novel, Nunez revisits the setting—the turbulent years of the ’60s—of her previous book, For Rouenna. “But this time I was interested in taking people from completely different backgrounds and putting them together during a critical period in their lives— the college years,” Nunez says. “I liked taking something that was autobiographical, revisiting a time and place that I actually lived, so even though the story itself did not happen [to me], the atmosphere was completely familiar.”

The vividness of the writing in The Last of Her Kind seems to mimic deft camera moves and angles, to show the interior of an elegant restaurant, where Ann meets her parents and treats their every word with the same contempt she has for every morsel of fancy food, or the exterior of Riverside Park—the setting that Georgette has chosen for the private joy of being able to sing unheard but which later becomes the site of a violent crime.

What will also be familiar to Nunez’s readers in The Last of Her Kind is her slightly detached authorial stance. There’s a simultaneous engagement and distancing from her characters’ intense emotional and political lives—a style that Nunez has employed since A Feather on the Breath of God was published, more than ten years ago. In that novel, the narrator remarks on “the miraculous possibility that art holds out to us: to be a part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time.”

“I think this is what Goethe meant,” Nunez says, “when he said that art is something you do by yourself, but when you’re finished, you share it with the world and participate with a larger community. The practice of art is extremely private, yet it brings you into the world.”

Whether she is telling her own story or the story of one of her fictional characters—or something tantalizingly in between—Nunez is a gifted storyteller. She says she’s currently working on a series of “autobiographical essays” that may or may not become a book. Whether one of her works is called an “autobiographical novel,” a “fictional biography,” or just a good, old-fashioned novel, her readers know Sigrid Nunez through the secrets and lies of fact and fiction, even if they can’t always tell the difference between them.

Renée H. Shea, professor of English and modern languages at Bowie State University, has written profiles of Andrea Levy, Rita Dove, and Sandra Cisneros, among others, for Poets &Writers Magazine. She coauthored Amy Tan in the Classroom: The Art of Invisible Strength, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, in 2004.