Photo by Frank and Helena / Getty Images
On the morning of the first day of the year, Nell is looking over her bookshelves while listening to a podcast. She’d made a single New Year’s resolution: to declutter her small apartment, starting with getting rid of some of her books. On the podcast, a journalist is explaining why January first is such a common birthday in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nell’s eye lands on the spine of a thin paperback by a French writer, Édouard Levé. She pulls it from the shelf and reads the back cover: “Édouard Levé was born on January 1, 1965.”
She knows that many people see coincidences as evidence of some kind of pattern underlying everyday life, some mysterious element connecting human beings to the world and to one another. It takes a heart of winter to accept that whatever happens could just as easily have happened differently, or not at all. Remarkable coincidences—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both authors of the Declaration of Independence, dying on the same day fifty years later, and that day being the Fourth of July—are proof enough for some of the existence of God. Though Nell doesn’t share these beliefs, she doesn’t doubt something else she’s heard—that the experience of a coincidence can cause the release of dopamine in a person’s brain.
She has also discovered that Agatha Christie was right: once a coincidence happens, others can start piling up in the most astonishing way.
In the book she is holding, a man tells the story of a friend who killed himself some years ago. Days after delivering the manuscript, Levé, who was forty-two, also killed himself. Not a coincidence.
the night before, Nell had been to a party. She had accepted the invitation, like most invitations, only half-heartedly. Even after the pandemic ended, Nell had remained a homebody. In recent months, working remotely—her preference, as she had discovered during the lockdown—she’d become all but a recluse.
But it was a tradition: every New Year’s Eve for the past twenty-odd years, Nell had been invited to a sit-down dinner hosted by a couple, Jasper and Chase, whom she’d first met through her ex-boyfriend Joel. The three men had been friends since college. For seven years, Nell and Joel had gone to the party together. After they broke up, they continued to be invited, which might have been awkward had they not stayed, if not close, at least amicable. But then Joel started seeing a woman to whom Jasper and Chase took a dislike. The feeling turned out to be mutual. The couples saw each other less and less, and after Joel and the woman got married, the old friendship died. Nell’s feelings about Joel’s new wife were neutral, but though she’d attended their wedding and lived only a few blocks away, she rarely saw them. She didn’t see Jasper and Chase often either—maybe once every few months—but it wouldn’t have been New Year’s Eve without an invitation to dinner at the art gallery they owned and managed together.
As with most of the pieces’ titles, she could not decipher the meaning at all.
There had been times when Nell brought along a date—she’d had other boyfriends since Joel—but most years, like this one, she went to the party alone.
It was a semiformal event: fifty guests divided between two long tables, where they were served an extraordinarily good and beautifully plated four-course meal. If she were honest with herself, Nell would have acknowledged that the food was the one thing she was always glad not to have missed. Among the guests were some who, like Nell, came year after year, and an equal number of new faces. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone was from the art world. Nell had met several artists through Jasper and Chase, some of them apparently famous but whose names she didn’t know. She had no interest in contemporary art, had resigned herself to being one of the many who lacked the ability to understand it, even when someone explained it to her. Which Jasper and Chase had given up doing. Not that they held this against her. If there was one thing they were used to, they said wryly, it was people not liking contemporary art. They continued to invite her to openings, and she continued to attend. It was easy to ignore what was on the walls because you could hardly see it for the crowd. She supposed that people who really wanted to appreciate the artwork must come back at another time. She herself had never done that. She had, however, tried to read the literature the gallery provided—descriptions of the art or a statement about the artist’s work in general. But it might as well have been hieroglyphics: as with most of the pieces’ titles, she could not decipher the meaning at all.
aside from the food, had she ever enjoyed herself at these dinners? Had she ever really wanted to go out on New Year’s Eve? Had the idea of a party ever excited her? Well, yes, and yes, and again, yes. There’d been a time when Nell had loved going out. It was one of the reasons she was glad to be living in New York, where the lights stayed on and places were open till all hours—it was almost as if you got to have two days, one before and a second one after dark. She had danced the night away at least weekly in her youth, and even after she’d lost her taste for the thrashing, beer-reeking crowds and earsplitting music of clubs, she still liked parties and meeting up with friends—enough to do so every few days.
It was hardly strange that she had changed as she grew older. She had less energy, especially at day’s end. She wanted to sleep eight hours a night and be up by first light, and she couldn’t very well do that if she’d been out late. And just being out was more tiring now, because everywhere you went was so loud. Even when there wasn’t any music blasting, everyone shouted as if there were. Back when they were young, the women Nell knew would have been mortified to be seen out to dinner on a weekend night with their girlfriends. But Sex and the City had upended that. Now it was girl table, girl table everywhere, and what all those friends had in common was a tendency to shriek. But she had noticed that even at private gatherings, the talk often grew raucous. You went home exhausted and woke up the next morning with a sore throat.
Age plus isolation: a formula for despair. Everyone knew that.
What Nell did find strange was this: In the past, she had never had trouble socializing, not even in new situations. She would have said she was good at it—adept at small talk, able as anyone to mingle and schmooze. But starting about a year ago, she had become a different person, the kind you dreaded being seated next to at a dinner. For some reason she could not name—a therapist from whom she’d briefly sought help had offered the unhelpful “generalized anxiety”—she now tended to be ill at ease when she was with others, including at times with friends. She was at her worst, though, meeting someone for the first time. Simple, perfectly polite questions made Nell flush, and she often struggled to keep up her end of a conversation. At a party, every encounter threatened to become awkward, and she sometimes left without having exchanged more than a few words with anyone.
It occurred to her how she must appear: not just shy or reserved but a bore who had no interest in others. In fact, all her life Nell had been curious about the people she met, no matter who they were. (As a child, she had frequently been reprimanded for asking a person too many questions about themselves, which was said to be nosy and rude.) She’d always thought of herself as a good listener, and so long as a person wasn’t hopelessly self-centered or bombastic (as, admittedly, a fair number were), she was happy to lend an ear. And yet it was also true that Nell was far less curious about people than she had once been, and if, as she feared, others found her boring, that was more and more how she found them. Somehow it had come about: being with real people was less satisfying to her than reading about characters in a book or watching them on-screen.
All of this was disconcerting to Nell, who didn’t think it was just about getting older. She didn’t buy the therapist’s diagnosis of generalized anxiety; she thought it was the beginning of something worse. But if socializing was less pleasurable than it had been before, she knew better than to give it up. Age plus isolation: a formula for despair. Everyone knew that.
at the gallery dinner, Nell sat silent, ignored, and bent over her plate, while those around her, mostly young and attractive, spun strands of conversation that every quarter of an hour or so intertwined and became one. She had once read a novel in which the main character—an eccentric, socially inept loner—describes how, among his office mates, he felt he was not an adult like them but, rather, a child in disguise. Although she did not identify with this character, she sometimes remembered his words when she was in company, and a similar feeling overtook her, as it did then. Nell had anticipated that much of the talk that evening would be about politics: bewailment of the election results, catastrophizing about life after Inauguration Day. Earlier, while guests were being served cocktails, she’d overheard one woman tell another that she couldn’t bring herself to wish anyone a happy New Year this year, because the words sounded sardonic.
One of the gallery’s artists, seated across from Nell, was a painter who’d just returned from the South of France, where she said all attention had been riveted on the trial of Dominique Pelicot. For having repeatedly drugged and raped his unsuspecting wife, and for having solicited dozens of men to also abuse her as she lay unconscious while he filmed them, Pelicot had received a maximum prison sentence of twenty years. Given that he was seventy-two, this meant he’d probably be locked up for the rest of his life, the painter said. But to her mind, the sentences of some of the fifty-one men who’d been convicted along with him were much too light. That was France, she said. Out of the corner of his mouth, a waiter who’d arrived to clear plates said, “In America, a crime like that could get you thrown in the White House.”
He was there this night with his wife, whose dress looked as if she’d gone swimming in a black bikini and gotten caught in a net.
The man sitting on Nell’s right had a horselaugh that clashed with his elegant suit. Soon after they had sat down, he had asked her whether she worked in the arts or some other profession. As usual with strangers, Nell kept it brief: she ran a small business that arranged entertainment for children’s parties. Sometimes, the parent of a young child would show some interest when they heard this. But Nell knew that would not be the case with this man, because she and he had had this very exchange once before. He was a collections manager at a museum in Houston, had known Chase and Jasper for years, and often came to New York, which was where he’d been raised, and though he’d clearly forgotten, he and Nell had met at a gallery opening that fall. He was there this night with his wife, whose dress looked as if she’d gone swimming in a black bikini and gotten caught in a net.
“Well, I can tell you this.” Nell recognized the young man, whose raised voice had caused several heads to turn, as one of the gallery’s former interns. “My generation is sick to death of our elders’ constant doomsaying, especially given that they’re the ones responsible for the misery we’re going to suffer from most.”
The elderly woman to whom these words had been addressed—someone whom Nell had an idea she ought also to recognize, someone well known, perhaps—smiled. “You sound as if you believe your generation would have behaved completely differently,” she said. “Which I very much doubt. Because the problem with people behaving badly—shortsightedly, irrationally, greedily—isn’t a generational problem. It’s a problem of human nature. Which is why history keeps repeating itself. The Greta Thunbergs of the world, like the Navalnys, will always be a rare breed. And see how many young people swung right this year, voting for the party that vowed to roll back environmental protections and ramp up production of fossil fuels, and for a president who calls climate change a hoax.”
“My son,” said a man who’d been staring gloomily into his wineglass. “Eighteen years old, his first time voting, and I couldn’t convince him that what he was voting for might mean the loss of the right to vote ever again.”
“Oh, I’ve given up trying to reason with the young,” said the woman, her smile broadening, as if she found the sorry state of things more amusing than consternating. “Take my students: happy to plagiarize and cheat in any way they can, yet constantly calling out professors for so-called inappropriate behavior, and wanting to teach us about morals.”
Nell waited to see how the young man would respond to this, but he had turned his attention to his phone and was now rapidly texting.
A teacher Nell knew had posted online something a student had written about her in a course evaluation: “Although this teacher never said anything inappropriate, you could tell that she was always on the verge of saying something inappropriate.” To those who’d responded with shock, she explained that this type of accusation was not uncommon. “And there’s no such thing as a wrong answer anymore. It’s either correct or ‘not quite.’” (And so Nell understood why, at her gym, the Pilates teacher always prefaced a correction by saying that if someone was doing an exercise “another” way, it wasn’t wrong, it was just different.)
As tradition had it, once dinner was over, whoever wished to stay was welcome—the champagne would keep flowing, the hosts promised—while others could move on to continue celebrating elsewhere. In the days when they were together, Nell and Joel had been among the party-hoppers, sometimes making the rounds till past dawn. But later, Nell usually only pretended that she had another invitation and instead went straight home. This year, by midnight, she was already in bed.
according to the podcast, many Afghans and Pakistanis did not celebrate birthdays the way people did in the West. In some towns, it was not unusual for parents to neglect to record the day their child was born. If there came a time when a date of birth was required—for some kind of official application, say—they frequently chose January first. It was also the most popular birthday among Afghans and Pakistanis who had not learned to read or write. Like marking an X in place of a signature.
Nell imagines other listeners struck the way she is by this: a person’s birthday considered a detail of no importance; people living their whole lives without ever needing to know something that those like her are used to providing over and over, those whose lives would come to a halt without it. She is reminded of another story she once heard: that in some parts of the world, there are societies that have no system for collecting garbage; rather than being discarded, everything nonperishable is repurposed or recycled. She was already aware that her own country produced more garbage than any other country, about four and a half pounds per citizen per day—three times the global average. Nell honestly doesn’t think she produces quite that much. But there is no escaping the shame. World trash leader. What a title. And second-worst polluter, after China.
she’d first heard about Édouard Levé’s book from a friend, a keen admirer of Levé and of this book especially. Her friend had wanted to include it on a reading list for a college course he taught but then thought better of it, he’d said. He was afraid that some students would find the book or even just the title, Suicide, triggering.
When Nell read the book, she, too, had admired it, and though she doubts she’ll read it again—very few of her books does she expect ever to read again—she decides it’s a keeper and returns it to the shelf.
She remembers her eighth-grade English class, how one day the teacher handed out copies of a book they were going to read and then took them back only days later. I thought you were mature enough, he said, but some of your mothers think not. The teacher’s name was Mr. Boyle, and she can still hear the disdain in his voice for those mothers. She had started reading the book but soon forgot all about it, except for one scene: a man sitting on a bed and talking with a woman who is cutting her toenails. The man very nervous, the woman unkempt. Even after Nell no longer remembered the book’s title, the scene stayed with her, and many years later came the surprise of happening on it again while reading Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. She thought of Mr. Boyle, who’d always seemed somewhat out of place, not only because male junior high school teachers were few but because of his looks; he was more like an actor playing a teacher—tall and svelte, with metallic-blue eyes and hair that, though silver before he reached thirty, was still thick and sleek. She imagined him excited at the idea of introducing O’Connor’s writing to his students, only to be thwarted by Mrs. Burke and Mrs. Cuoco and Mrs. Kronsky, mocked by Nell’s own mother as the three harpies of the PTA.
Strange to think that this kind of reading was vanishing.
But as Nell recalls, at the age of thirteen, she had not been mature enough to comprehend what she was reading. And now she has to wonder how Mr. Boyle would have dealt with the encounter between Hazel Motes and Mrs. Watts on what men’s-room graffiti advertised as “the friendliest bed in town.”
Her friend who’d wanted to teach Suicide had admitted that one of the main reasons he’d chosen it was because it was short: a novella. His students wouldn’t read long books, he’d said. Many teachers had stopped assigning whole books at all, bowing to students’ preference for excerpts (twenty pages, max). Can’t you just summarize the books for us? one frustrated student had asked. And few teachers were willing to teach O’Connor’s work anymore, because of her frequent use of the N-word and biographical evidence of her unapologetic bigotry.
Back in Nell’s own college days, assignments totaling more than a thousand pages a week were normal. Ulysses, Moby-Dick, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Magic Mountain, Rousseau’s Confessions, Paradise Lost—these were just some of the books she’d been expected to plow through for one semester’s courses (and every one of them a keeper, lugged along over decades as she moved from place to place). Strange to think that this kind of reading was vanishing. One of many changes in her lifetime, like America’s repudiation of democracy, that she’d never imagined would come to pass.
Not that Nell sees any appeal in marathon reading today. And when she conjures up that young person, pulling an all-nighter in a dorm room so messy it looks like the narcs tossed it, it’s as if the two of them are separate people, as if she is no longer that woman at all.
Throughout school, and for years after, she’d read books that, no matter the page count, she’d hated to see come to an end. Reading a book now, she often finds herself thinking that it has no business being as long as it is. This novel, she’ll think, is really just a supersized short story; or, in the case of nonfiction, an essay. (Can’t you just summarize?) Then she might end up skimming the book or deciding to stop reading it altogether.
Even poetry tests her patience at times, and she worships the concision of haiku.
She takes another book down from the shelf and flips through it until she finds the poem by Buson that she is looking for.
New Year’s first poem
written, now self-satisfied
O haiku poet!
Sigrid Nunez is the author of, most recently, The Vulnerables. It Will Come Back to You, a story collection, will be published in August 2026.
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