“Greensleeves”
by Sigrid Nunez
from the September 9, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
A few weeks ago I checked out Sigrid Nunez’s 2023 novel The Vulnerables, but it’s still sitting unread on my nightstand. I bring that up just to indicate that I have been wanting to get to know her work, even if I haven’t quite delved in yet. Here’s a good opportunity! I enjoyed the first section and am looking forward to finishing it later today.
Here is how it begins:
“What I want to know,” the woman said to the therapist, “is why the voices always say mean, terrible things. Why don’t they ever say things like ‘You’re a good person. You’re a great, smart, wonderful guy, your life matters, and you deserve to be happy’? I mean, instead of saying, ‘You’re no good, your life is worthless, everyone hates you, you should hurt yourself, you deserve to be hurt, you deserve to die.’
“Even worse,” the woman went on, “why do the voices always say things like ‘Go shove some innocent stranger in front of an oncoming train’? Instead of, like, ‘How about helping that little old lady with her bags?'”
The therapist is attending a party with people he doesn’t know, and this woman — thirtyish he thinks — is the Greensleeves of the title.
As I said, I haven’t read too much yet, but I’m intrigued. Please share your thoughts below!
Sometimes it is said that good writing helps us understand what otherwise might be difficult to sort out. And maybe in these times there is a lot that is difficult to figure out. So Sigrid Nunez’s “Greensleeves” is really great at describing what she sees. Just really great, straight up observation with nothing but what happened, with what we know and don’t know about the main characters.
This is kind of a sketch story about something that might have happened at a party in a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has a masterful opening or “inciting incident” when the women asks, “. . . why the voices always say mean, terrible things.” The brilliance of that is that it could be mental “inner voices” or the voices of real people on the news or on the street or the voices of trolls on the internet. It’s one of those big unanswerable questions one easily connects with the current zeitgeist or how things are right now.
And Nunez sort of answers it or sorts it out. And she does it similarly to how Seamus Heaney answered the ask or why of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, which he did with the calm observed reality of his poetry. Nunez uniquely answers the question or suggests possible answers to the question with a song.
Bad things happen to innocent people like mental disorder of some sort but good things can happen to people too. So even if there is bad, there can still be good. Or bad things might or might not improve. And relationships might be good and might go bad and there are no absolutes. What happens happens.
I like that the guy therapist who seems well meaning and tries to do the best he can within professional limitations. And he is able to adjust such as when his wife leaves him. And the Lady Greensleeves seems a little like Lady Gaga. Flamboyant but well-intentioned. And Lady Greensleeves is a concerned sister trying to find answers for her brother’s difficulties.
The therapist is there for his daughter. So Nunez is noticing that either good or bad can happen or influence any relationship or any situation either way.
She could seem to be normalizing bad behavior that seems to resist being characterized as normalcy. But if something helps you realize how things are without having to go into “why,” it all may become a little easier to deal with. Which kind of seems where the Greensleeves song comes in.
It’s kind of a plea for romantic normalcy even if there might never be any or not enough. If you listen to the Marianne Faithfull version of that song, it sounds like the bass backing is in a major chord but the actual song in sung in a plaintive minor key. Hope for the best but know it might never be. But overall, we or the person or character will continue.
So what I like about this story and the song is that it introduces resiliency as the resolution to conflict. There are other ways to see the story. But the song gives the story a resonance it might not otherwise have. And gives us hope.
Sometimes it is said that good writing helps us understand what otherwise might be difficult to sort out. And maybe in these times there is a lot that is difficult to figure out. So Sigrid Nunez’s “Greensleeves” is really great at describing what she sees. Just really great, straight up observation with nothing but what happened, with what we know and don’t know about the main characters.
This is kind of a sketch story about something that might have happened at a party in a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has a masterful opening or “inciting incident” when the women asks, “. . . why the voices always say mean, terrible things.” The brilliance of that is that it could be mental “inner voices” or the voices of real people on the news or on the street or the voices of trolls on the internet. It’s one of those big unanswerable questions one easily connects with the current zeitgeist or how things are right now.
And Nunez sort of answers it or sorts it out. And she does it similarly to how Seamus Heaney answered the ask or why of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, which he did with the calm observed reality of his poetry. Nunez uniquely answers the question or suggests possible answers to the question with a song.
Bad things happen to innocent people like mental disorder of some sort but good things can happen to people too. So even if there is bad, there can still be good. Or bad things might or might not improve. And relationships might be good and might go bad and there are no absolutes. What happens happens.
I like that the guy therapist who seems well meaning and tries to do the best he can within professional limitations. And he is able to adjust such as when his wife leaves him. And the Lady Greensleeves seems a little like Lady Gaga. Flamboyant but well-intentioned. And Lady Greensleeves is a concerned sister trying to find answers for her brother’s difficulties.
The therapist is there for his daughter. So Nunez is noticing that either good or bad can happen or influence any relationship or any situation either way.
She could seem to be normalizing bad behavior that seems to resist being characterized as normalcy. But if something helps you realize how things are without having to go into “why,” it all may become a little easier to deal with. Which kind of seems where the Greensleeves song comes in.
It’s kind of a plea for romantic normalcy even if there might never be any or not enough. If you listen to the Marianne Faithfull version of that song, it sounds like the bass backing is in a major chord but the actual song in sung in a plaintive minor key. Hope for the best but know it might never be. But overall, we or the person or character will continue.
So what I like about this story and the song is that it introduces resiliency as the resolution to conflict. There are other ways to see the story. But the song gives the story a resonance it might not otherwise have. And gives us hope.
Sometimes it is said that good writing helps us understand what otherwise might be difficult to figure out.
It has a masterful opening or “inciting incident” when the women asks, “. . . why the voices always say mean, terrible things.” The brilliance of that is that it could be mental “inner voices” or sometimes the voices of real people on the news or on the street or the voices of trolls on the internet.
The guy therapist who seems well meaning. And he is able to adjust such as when his wife leaves him. And the Lady Greensleeves seems a little like Lady Gaga. Flamboyant but well-intentioned. And Lady Greensleeves is a concerned sister trying to find answers for her brother’s difficulties.
The therapist is there for his daughter. So Nunez is noticing that either good or bad can happen or influence any relationship or any situation either way.
But if something helps you realize how things are without having to go into “why,” it all may become a little easier to deal with. Which kind of seems where the Greensleeves song comes in.
So what I like about this story and the song is that it introduces resiliency as the resolution to those inner voices. There are other ways to see the story. But the song gives the story a resonance it might not otherwise have.
When I finished the story, I was left feeling that intractions had taken place, but none of the characters connected, and there were no resolutions. As the comments above suggest, the story is an observation. We witness the narrator observing through the eyes of the therapist… I’m not inspired to do any further analysis.
Larry, I wonder why you posted excerpts from Hugh’s comments.
After writing my comments above, I wasn’t satisfied that they were quite fair or fully represented my thoughts on the story. I actually liked the writing more than I made it seem, focusing on what it seemed to lack. But if depicting the absence of connection between people was what the author intended, then in this she succeeded.
Since then, I have read 6 more stories by Nunez, in periodicals between 2011 to 2023. She doesn’t seem to have published a collection, so I had to find these online. Yeah, there I go, I’m so inconsistent: I hate reading online, I seek to avoid it, but if I must then I must.
I liked all the stories at least as much or more than “Greensleeves”. They each similarly follow the pov of a main character, sometimes in first person, showing them experiencing themselves largely in isolation from others, while among them. Or they are expressed as recollections in a detached way. They often read like essays or memoirs, and very much psychological and philosophical. All in a good way. Any of them would be at home in a selective anthology.
Links to them below. Usually you are allowed two free reads at a site, or two per month. You’d better read the whole story without leaving the site, because returning is a 2nd visit.
The first is a sort of adventure at an airport—compelling, but without the depth of the others. I hope some of you will try these out. I’d love to read your comments.
Zeehttps://www.threepennyreview.com/airport-story/
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23438-imagination
https://www.conjunctions.com/print/article/sigrid-nunez-c58
https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/7036/the-blind-sigrid-nunez
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n21/sigrid-nunez/it-will-come-back-to-you
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/11/i-remember-sigrid-nunez/
There is another Nunez story in the 2019 Best American Short Stories, which I read back then, but didn’t note the author, and have now forgotten—must find! She has also written novels and non-fiction, which I’m tempted to try.
Last evening I posted another comment, which didn’t appear. This morning I tried to post it again, having kept a copy. A message came up saying I seem to have already posted it. I left the site and came back, but the post still hasn’t appeared. Judging from the repeated copies of Hugh’s comments, under Larry Bone’s name, there seem to be some posting problems here.
I am not sure why the duplicate comments showed up above. That’s a unique issue I’ve never seen before, and it might be a mistake on Larry’s end trying to copy and paste maybe.
As for your comment, Eddie, I’m glad to say it’s there now. Because it has so many links in it, it got filtered into the spam folder (multiple links is a common feature of spam trying to direct traffic to shady places). I found it and approved it :-)