Preferring the Company of Parrots and Dogs

Nolan Kelly watches two movie adaptations of Sigrid Nunez novels, “The Room Next Door” and “The Friend.”

By Nolan KellyAugust 13, 2025

• Film

• Fiction

IN MY COPY of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018), on extended loan from a friend of mine, there’s a scrawled note in the margin of page seven: “first image.” The line it refers to is set within the middle of a memorial service, as the unnamed narrator encounters her recently deceased friend’s surviving spouse: “Wife Three, it must be said, looked radiant, though it was a cold radiance like that of a blade.”

While this line is imagistic in the sense that it contains the word “looked,” it doesn’t exactly paint a portrait of the lady. Throughout the novel, what she actually looks like—her height, race, hair and eye color, name, and every other aspect beyond her age and her reported elegance—remains abstract, as is the case for all human characters who appear in Nunez’s recent work. The only being Nunez names and concretely describes in The Friend is Apollo, the dead writer’s Great Dane, who is given a probing, almost exhaustive examination over the course of the novel’s 200-plus pages of otherwise dissociative musings.

This is, of course, the triumph of Nunez’s prose. In contrast to literature’s usual anthropocentric impulse, Nunez reverses hierarchy, making the people in her fiction conduits for historical recall and philosophical debate, while Apollo the Harlequin Great Dane gets large hazel eyes, paws like door knockers, and unevenly cropped ears. If the animals in Nunez’s novels appear at first as beasts of metaphorical burden (the dog as grief and mourning in The Friend, the parrot as intergenerational communication in her most recent novel, 2023’s The Vulnerables), their concreteness, in prose that is otherwise so immaterial, grants them an uncanny degree of “personality.”

This tilt between specificity and evocative allusion is a big part of what makes reading Nunez so engaging. Often, we are dropped into soliloquies by characters who have only been introduced to us in the most basic terms (“this woman,” “my friend,” “a rangy man”), leaving us to fill in the details of their presence. Her animals, by contrast, serve as gentle reminders that the world we’re imagining is not entirely our own; it’s shared with creatures who refuse to open up, who regard our narrator with an alien intelligence, and whose detailed descriptions stubbornly externalize them from our imaginative realm. Taken together, the experience of reading Nunez combines the usual passive immersion of classic literature with a more contemporary, participatory kind of involvement as we work to give her people the concreteness of her pets. It’s no surprise, then, that many readers develop a sense of ownership over the characters they conjure.

Last year, several of Nunez’s most spectral figures, along with Apollo the dog, became the property of Hollywood casting directors. The Friend, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, stars Naomi Watts as the narrator and Bill Murray as Apollo’s suicidal former owner. Appearing in theaters three months prior to The Friend’s wide release was Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a splashy adaptation of Nunez’s 2020 follow-up novel What Are You Going Through, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. In The Friend, Watts plays a single middle-aged novelist named Iris. In The Room Next Door, Moore plays a single middle-aged novelist named Ingrid. In each case, they try to externalize the precise, patient, capacious nature of the Nunezian narrator—detached, casually withering about the people around her, and instinctively agnostic about the purpose of continuing on in a world such as ours.

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While What Are You Going Through is not an overt sequel to The Friend, the two books might as well be narrated by the same person. In both cases, she is a writer and teacher who has lived in an apartment in Downtown New York for many years. Apparently fine with muddling through a life of obscurity, she is nonetheless possessed with countless anecdotes about the lives and legacies of other, incendiary artists. Instinctively self-abnegating, her identity is first and foremost that of a writer, which makes her implicitly responsible for the work she appears in. She is friends with other quietly striving female writers, and ex-lovers with the aggressively intellectual male kind. Both novels share a quality of erudite free association, as well as a conspicuous cynicism around gender relations and the irredeemability of men.

Both novels introduce their narrator as a character moving about the world, whose near-invisibility in the eyes of others, particularly men, keeps her from affecting it. The first chapter of The Friend includes a disquisition on the nature of the streetwalking flaneur and the apparent impossibility of there ever being such a thing as a flaneuse, given that women walking on the street always attract unwanted attention. At this remark, the narrator juts in: “Of course, a woman has only to wait until she’s a certain age, when she becomes invisible, and—problem solved.” In the early pages of What Are You Going Through, Nunez’s narrator stops off to get a glass of wine on the way home from a literary event and, in her first direct encounter with another character in the novel, is ignored: “At last the bartender sauntered over (so I had not become see-through) and took my order.”

That the Nunezian narrator is rendered nearly invisible is not just a matter of artistic preference. It’s also a political position, one that allows her to observe with detachment the various ways that women around her, young and old alike, are dominated by the male gaze and their own faltering, self-conscious conformity to beauty standards. Regarding this dynamic, Nunez is trenchantly derisive. The remove of the narrator, however, allows such opinions to be arrived at independently, without something like skin in the game.

These narrators’ gender pessimism—and their morbidity in general—is the closest we get to any discerning attributes for Nunez’s protagonists as characters. Their take on society’s dismissal of aging women from the public realm, cynical to the point of misanthropy, seems to have resonated with readers during a moment of post–Me Too reckoning: if we were only ever pretending women had a fair shake in the workplace or the political stage, here is someone who was never taken in by that myth. Anyone watching these films before turning to the books will be surprised to find that much of the actual content on the page concerns gender relations and the uneven, perpetually losing battle women face to extract dignity from them.

That’s because neither film is about any of this. Siegel and McGehee’s superficially straightforward adaptation of The Friend completely misses the book’s ruminative qualities, dilating instead the handful of pages from the book where things “actually happen.” Bereft of Nunez’s subtleties, it is essentially a story about a woman negotiating the “no pets” clause in her lease. The Room Next Door fares better, since both it and the novel it’s adapted from feature multiple major characters who engage in long sessions of dialogue about climate catastrophe, antinatalism, and assisted suicide. Even still, much of this discussion is cut down—simply because movies are made up of images, which is something Nunez has hardly any interest in conjuring.

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Of course, you have to cast someone. Naomi Watts and Julianne Moore can do a fine job taking up the mantle of literary introvert, because they’re both great actresses. But to suggest that either would escape a bartender’s notice is frankly preposterous.

Early in What Are You Going Through, for instance, the narrator reserves particular scorn for a woman she identifies as a “glam academic,” and “intellectual vamp.” She speculates that this woman will later sacrifice her dignity trying to get the attention of an (older) male colleague who only has eyes for a (much younger) graduate student. “The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair […] everything says: I’m still fuckable.” “Glam academic” might as well describe any of the women we see before us on the screen—the closest a major studio production could get to conjuring such a bookish milieu. It’s perhaps generous, then, that these films lack fidelity to her scorn for the type.

But then, there’s a certain subtle glamour to the Nunezian narrator as well. Though she might be a misanthrope now, and single by choice, she has been in her share of serious relationships. She has no illusions about her age but retains her dignity and sense of humor, even if she prefers to keep them to herself. She knows something about everything, and can quote another writer on just about any subject. Most importantly, she lacks interest in doing anything other than what she wants, and such discernment is always an easy thing to admire, at least in the one-sided relationship of reading.

This glamour seems to radiate directly from the author herself. Though Nunez keeps a low profile, with little interest in the promotional advantages of social media or magazine coverage, the production design of Iris’s West Village apartment in The Friend hews uncannily close to Nunez’s own West Village apartment, as described in the introduction to her Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review:

Sigrid Nunez makes a policy of not inviting interviewers into the studio apartment on West Thirteenth Street where she has lived for decades. But during the last of our sessions, on Zoom, she picked up her laptop and danced me in a circle: bed tucked behind the sofa and book-laden coffee table under a large, cheerful geometric abstract painting on long-term loan from the artist, Dan Walsh, an ex-boyfriend; dining table bearing tulips and framed by walls of books; Singer sewing-machine desk with holes in it; hydrangeas on the book-filled sideboard, below the vista of a courtyard’s reddish fire escapes.

At one point, to calm the restless Apollo, Watts’s character reads aloud from an issue of The New York Review of Books, an outlet the real-life Nunez once worked for. In Almodóvar’s looser, springier adaptation, the Nunezian narrator helped found Paper magazine.

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The Friend plays provocatively with autofiction as a theme and a subject, dancing around the idea that Nunez has possibly cherry-picked some of her most sensitive details from an actual friend’s life, obscuring his identity with the thin veneer of a nameless “you” whom the author addresses. This epistolary mode is a powerful move, effectively imagining the addressee not as another character but a perspectival force.

My friend who lent me The Friend was bothered by the adaptation’s replacement of this force by the actor Bill Murray. When we saw the film together at its New York Film Festival premiere, I told her that this casting choice seemed almost perfect to me, considering that Murray is aging, he has a tabloid history of being a crude womanizer, and much of his film work from the past 20 years has consisted of sad and defeatist comedy that is never far from the noose. But my friend was mostly upset that Bill Murray’s character had a name, Walter—violating the circle of mystery Nunez uses to veil her characters. This sort of ambiguity is genuinely intriguing in the book.

In a talkback, Murray said that his biggest issue with the film was that it could have been funnier. This infuriated my friend even further, validating her suspicion that none of the people onstage understood that the book they had bought the rights to was one of the foremost modern meditations on grief, a brave investigation into what makes continuing to live worthwhile. But honestly, I was thinking the same thing as Murray. From a comedian’s perspective, the scenario is obviously suggestive to comedy: big dog, small apartment.

In the novel, the Nunezian narrator couches her relationship with the dog in literary references, while the dog itself does little to disrupt her thoughts on misogyny and death. In the movie, Apollo’s pure physicality and size are always at play, though this potential is rarely utilized. One of the great surprises of the movie The Friend is that it is not more madcap. I was expecting a cross between Marmaduke (2010) and Marley & Me (2008), especially after learning about the extensive casting process for the Harlequin Great Dane. Instead, in a vanishingly rare instance of studio restraint, the movie is, like the book, almost serenely drama-free. Even at her lowest—running late to classes, leaving a giant dog alone in the cramped apartment she now stands to get evicted from, and having spent the last several nights on an air mattress because he’s taken over the bed—Watts scarcely has a hair out of place. Her situation seems to suggest more general beleaguerment than acute stress. After all, isn’t the dog just a metaphor? Isn’t this all just an allegory for grief?

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If the few details Nunez offers on the page become less meaningful in a sea of other images, her lack of physical descriptions was surely seen as a boon by the filmmakers, granting them a blank slate. A great, sumptuous irony of these adaptations is that they have taken two novels, not simply austere with lack of description but almost drab in tone, and turned them into some of the most colorfully cozy confections of the past decade.

Iris’s apartment in The Friend is just steps away from Washington Square Park, and she walks Apollo in a large navy wool coat that graciously complements Apollo’s bright red leash. (Siegel and McGehee tapped Sofia Coppola’s costume designer to do the wardrobe.) The actress Sarah Pidgeon sometimes joins her as Val, a character entirely invented for the movie, whose purpose seems to be equally to externalize Iris’s neuroses and to model a series of increasingly gorgeous wool sweaters.

In Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, this sort of smuggled-in glamour reaches escape velocity. The film’s plot follows the same basic outline of What Are You Going Through, with fewer digressions and more melodrama. As in the book, the Nunezian narrator attends to a friend dying of cancer and becomes drawn in by her desire for assisted suicide in the face of the terminal illness. The film stars Julianne Moore as a writer who has just published a best-selling book about “being terrified of death” and reconnects with her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a globe-trotting journalist now unhappily interred in a hospital. After much consideration, Moore’s character agrees to abet Swinton’s in illegally premeditating the end to her life, and the two drive upstate to do it in style. In one particularly rich instance of cinematic liberty, the Airbnb the two women stay at—described in What Are You Going Through as “the New England home of […] former college professors” becomes Casa Szoke, a jagged ecomodernist landmark located just outside Madrid. (This is Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, and he seems to have been reluctant to enter the Anglosphere. Whenever possible, he chose to shoot in his native Spain, and every minor character in The Room Next Door, from baristas to gym instructors, speaks with an amusingly thick Madrid accent; Swinton and Moore take all this in stride.)

Despite introducing egregious excess into a story of determined constraints, Almodóvar’s adaptation is by far the better film. These two Nunezes, coming out at nearly the same time, serve to underscore an important lesson about literary adaptation: the most interesting movie is almost always the least faithful. To create a visual world that is both dynamic and convincing, directors must look beyond the page for inspiration. For Almodóvar, that meant sourcing art-direction references from a glut of contemporary fashion designers, as well as constructing entire scenes around tableau-like shots paying homage to paintings by Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. Wardrobes and props revolve relationally around a singular color palette: eggplant purple, mint green, cerulean, and mauve. And he reverently accentuates the striking, idiosyncratic beauty of Swinton and Moore, taking them both far beyond the level of “intellectual vamp.” All of this necessarily flies in the face of the monastic tone Nunez sets in her novel, but no matter. Surely some people must contemplate suicide while draping their Loewe coat over their Eames chair.

But what makes The Room Next Door great is that it has the audacity to improve on its source. In Almodóvar’s biggest departure from the novel, he turns Swinton’s character into a former war correspondent, a vocation that not only explains her previously long absence from Ingrid’s life but also clarifies the edge required for her to make such hard decisions around her own fate. After all, Martha must have grown used to staring death in the face.

This additional backstory, as well as the director’s casting of an actress as tremendous as Swinton to embody her, goes a long way toward making Martha in The Room Next Door feel relatable, in ways that the unnamed friend in Nunez’s novel often isn’t. In What Are You Going Through, she’s merely described as another writer; the day-to-day conditions of her battle with cancer feel vague, and her childhood reminiscences never quite coalesce. What’s more, this character is just one of a cacophony of voices that drop in on the narrator—including the German writer Ingeborg Bachmann and, at one point, a talking cat. How the dying woman fundamentally differs from the narrator is never fully established, and it is even suggested that their dialogue is merely the projection of a vitally ambivalent psyche.

Cinema has its own proud history of two women mirroring one another to the point of uncanniness. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), it’s projected from without by a male obsessive; in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), it bubbles up from within a sapphic spiral. (Oddly enough, movies where two men become indistinguishable from one another are much harder to find.) It’s refreshing for many reasons, then, that Almodóvar decided to cast two women as strikingly different from one another as Moore and Swinton when making a movie about their affinities. In The Room Next Door, they complement each other almost as well as their precisely coordinated sweaters and coats. They really do feel like old friends, who, having been separated for a while, immediately get back into the old groove of their rapport. It’s surprising to go back to Nunez’s novel after having seen the film and discover that this amity is so conspicuously absent from the original text. There, the unnamed dying woman is a scandal, a gambit, a task.

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There is a deeper register that these books reach for, a political valence in which their popularity becomes a subversive cultural force. Across the novels and stories she’s published over the past 10 years, Sigrid Nunez has become the closest thing we have to a poet-philosopher for the childless cat lady (sorry, Taylor Swift). The author, who is herself unmarried and childless by choice—she has spoken and written before about weighing the decision of starting a family against being a writer—has been mining this vein since far before it was popular. She has always been wincingly sensitive to society’s ambivalence about women like her, who do not reproduce or otherwise insist on fulfilling desires for men, who do not have any interest in playing patriarchy’s games. Her books are openly curious about the ethics of suicide, assisted suicide, and antinatalism, specifically as a response to ecological crises. After the 2024 election, this type of American has become newly vulnerable—a vulnerability that will only deepen the closer ardent pronatalists like J. D. Vance and Elon Musk get to policymaking. Their political visions marginalize and malign women who do not wish to consign themselves to being the reproductive engines of large, nonimmigrant families. It’s enough to make one skeptical about the purpose of continuing on in a world such as ours.

These two new films give a (rather literal) facelift to those on the other side. To be sure, their values are liberal, cosmopolitan, perhaps a touch decadent: not winning over any new converts in our interminable culture wars. But it has never been more important to defend Nunez’s values of ensuring that women have the right to choose how they participate in society, including the right to refuse to participate at all—to be a misanthrope, preferring the company of parrots and dogs.

The Room Next Door and The Friend are both, if nothing else, immensely likable movies. Faithful to their subjects? Hardly. As probing or skeptical as anything else that bears Nunez’s name? I don’t think so. But they’re nice movies all the same. Both deliver an emotional kick at the end, and both manage to successfully reduplicate the strange alchemy of Nunez’s novels in the most essential sense: you leave behind so much meditation on death feeling oddly glad to be alive, quite possibly happier than when you first came across them.

And isn’t this just a magical sensation? To pass through a world almost like a bardo in Nunez’s slim books, where stories about suicide haunt every other page, and one senses at times real moments of doubt about the viability of any kind of life amid all the grief. (“Suicide is contagious,” a psychologist tells the narrator in The Friend.) But the Nunezian narrator never seems to fall into such a crisis herself, and she calmly carries us through to the other side. This sense of protagonist as solemn guardian in the world of the dead manages, somehow, to persist in these movies, and we feel safer for it.