What you're going through

What are you going through? This question appears continuously throughout the book, and the answer is a deeply human story about friendship, empathy, and coming to terms with human finitude. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, reunites after years with a journalist friend with whom she once worked on a magazine editorial staff and who is facing a terminal illness. At her request, he decides to be close to her during her last days. From this framework, a mosaic of encounters and conversations with people who, in their own way, seek to understand the world and themselves gradually unfolds.

 Nunez presents an almost philosophical dialogue, highlighting the absurdity of a world that does not allow those who suffer to voluntarily leave an overpopulated planet, and the alibism of a humanity systematically heading towards suffering and destruction. The author's style is distinguished by her spare, precise language, gentle humour and insight, thanks to which she turns even a serious topic into a text full of life. What You're Going Through is a remarkable and extremely sophisticated piece of introspective prose that confronts the reader with the universal questions of human existence. It brings a contemporary perspective on accompanying another person to the end of life, on friendship and death with dignity, and does so naturally and without pathos.

 The book has won numerous awards and was also the basis for the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door (2024), which stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.