Here is my morning routine: when I get out of bed, my feet must touch the edge of the rug, one at a time, while I softly vocalize two magic words that are best described as puffing and plosive sounds. If my feet don’t touch correctly, or if I don’t say the words right, I get back in bed and try again. Once I have properly performed this initial procedure, I again tap my left foot on the carpet while vocalizing the first magic word, and then—while holding my breath and without moving my mouth or tongue one millimeter during the duration—I silently incant a phrase that is far too nonsensical and embarrassing to share publicly, then tap my right foot while vocalizing the second magic word.

This can take anywhere from ten seconds, if I’m lucky, to two or three minutes. Once executed to my satisfaction, I am able to go downstairs, unplug my phone and perform roughly the same procedure on it, with my thumbs instead of my feet, and then I am allowed to use my phone. Likewise, the refrigerator door when I’m making coffee. Likewise, the edges of my laptop when I power it on. With these routines completed, I can start my day, open a Word document, and begin writing.

I realize this sounds bad, but it’s a compromise I’ve reached after decades of managing my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve gone cold turkey before, renouncing all habits and tics, but they eventually creep back in. A therapist once described OCD behaviors as a “blob,” which felt apt; whatever part of it you press down on, another part bulges back up. These little routines are, in a sense, a deal I make with myself, so I don’t have to perform random routines all day long. Not doing them is not an option. If I don’t do them, the world will end.

I can’t remember exactly when it began. As is true of so many disorders, medical literature generally links OCD with the onset of adolescence, and this tracks with my earliest OCD memories: missing the bus to middle school because I had to touch mailboxes and the curb in a certain sequence; playing songs on my cassette deck over and over in order to pause on an exact word or chord; staying up in my teenage basement lair, flicking the lights on and off in patterns that, if my parents had noticed, would have looked like some Morse code call for help, which in a way, it was.

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Photo: Marion Ettlinger.

Sigrid Nunez, like Virginia Woolf, is a writer known for her intellectual rigor and her ability to capture, insightfully and unsentimentally, the myriad complexities of human life in beautifully written prose. In the ambition and variety of their work, they have much in common. Something else that they share: neither Sigrid Nunez nor Virginia Woolf is thought of as a warm-and-fuzzy writer, and yet both, quite literarily, are.

And I mean warm and fuzzy in every sense of the phrase. For while both Nunez’s marmoset Mitz (from her 1998 novel Mitz) and Woolf’s spaniel Flush (the hero of Flush: A Biography, published by Woolf in 1933) are warm-blooded and furry creatures (although they suffer the indignities of lice and fleas), they are also engaging characters based upon actual animals. Many famous nonhuman literary characters are inventions: Chekhov’s lapdog, E. B. White’s mouse and pig and spider and swan, Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller, John Steinbeck’s Red Pony, and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Elsa, the lion who was born free, did exist, as did Tulip, J. R. Ackerley’s beloved Alsatian bitch. Nevertheless, real or imagined, few animals have literary pedigrees as noble as Flush and Mitz. Read More

I am in a barn-red house on a hill. In my room there is a bookshelf, a desk for me to write at, a soft bed covered by a blue quilt, a wooden crucifix on the wall that opens to reveal the items necessary for administering last rites. Where I am now, there are peacocks, a rust-colored mule named Lulu, and hundred-foot-tall pine trees. Where I am now, I have my own bedroom.

Here are some of the places I slept last year: Under a bush in front of a high school in Evansville, Indiana. In the stairwell of an apartment building in St. Louis, Missouri. In a car-wash stall in Kentucky. In an open field behind a McDonald’s in Illinois. In a booth at that same McDonald’s. In a laundromat. In the backseat of an abandoned car. In a stranger’s garage. In a chair at the public library. In a toolshed. In a burned-out mobile home. In a drug dealer’s backyard. On a drug dealer’s living room floor. On a drug dealer’s couch. In a drug dealer’s bed. On more than one occasion I’ve woken up on a total stranger’s front porch with no memory of how I got there.

Last year, I was arrested three times for possession of methamphetamine, charged each time with having a single loaded syringe in my pocket. In Illinois, any paraphernalia containing residue of a controlled substance is considered possession, a Class III felony, carrying a sentence of two to five years in prison. The last time I was arrested I spent over six months in jail before my grandmother agreed to post bond. The rest of my family would hardly speak to me. I have yet to be tried.

Nine years ago, I had just finished a master’s degree in writing at Washington University in St. Louis, was awarded a postgraduate fellowship, and had my very first short story published in Granta magazine. It was the tale of a young addict jailed on drug charges, titled “Here Is What You Do.” When I wrote the story, I had never been to jail. I had never injected drugs. I was clean, working as a college instructor, taking care of my son, spending a few hours every day working on other stories I wanted to include in the manuscript I was about to send to agents. Read More