By mere chance, The Friend has been a part of my life for quite some time now. I was first introduced to the book when Hal Hartley recommended it for my book club sometime around 2021, when I was just a girl with two cats. Fast forward and it’s 2024, now I love dogs and had just adopted a puppy named Variety Magazine. It was during that spring, on one of those early days of puppyhood, that he got street cast for a b-roll sequence in an upcoming film… that was to be an adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s The Friend. […]
by Amalia Ulman on Apr 4, 2025When author Sigrid Nunez tells people that two of her recent novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through, have been adapted into films, she’s amused by their inevitable reactions. “They say very somberly, ‘Are they faithful to the book? Have [you] been insulted?’” “It’s charming because it’s so naive,” she laughs. “You’d never want a transcription!” For a novelist who’s been publishing since 1995, that two strong adaptations suddenly exist—both auteurist affairs retaining their novels’ concerns and essential architecture—is quite remarkable. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend is a warm, witty adaptation of Nunez’s 2018 National Book […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 16, 2024