That’s more or less what she’s been doing for the last three decades. Ever since she was young, she’s never wanted to do anything else: “I just wanted to do one thing well, and that was the thing.”

A Deliberate Distance From the Literary Scene

Growing up in the housing projects of Staten Island in the 1950s, the daughter of a German mother and a Panamanian-Chinese father, Nunez was an imaginative child who turned to books for solace and escape. Her father worked seven days a week, as a kitchen worker in a hospital and weekends as a waiter in various Chinese restaurants, and her mother took care of the household. She studied English at Barnard College and later got her Masters in Fine Arts from Columbia University. After graduating, she worked at The New York Review of Books as an editorial assistant to the editor, Robert B. Silvers. Through her work at the Review, she got to know Susan Sontag, and became close to her later when she began dating her son. That friendship gave Nunez an up-close glimpse of the life of a professional writer, and she realized that Sontag’s fame, and the attention and obligations that came with it, held no appeal for her.

“It was very clear to me that even if I wanted something like that, I could never handle it,” she said. “I wanted quiet.”

Nunez has hardly been laboring in obscurity — she’s published eight books, and she won several literary awards before receiving the National Book Award, including the Whiting Award and Rome Prize. Her work is beloved by fellow novelists (more than a decade ago, Gary Shteyngart called her “one of the most dizzyingly accomplished of our writers”). But she’s kept a deliberate distance from the literary scene, which gives her “a certain amount of freedom and outsiderness,” she said. In an era when publishers expect writers to constantly market themselves and court fans on Twitter or Instagram, she maintains a sort of stoic silence online, and has no social media accounts.

For better or worse, it’s also kept her work somewhat under the radar, while many of her peers have ascended to prominence.

“The way that she sets herself apart, you might not notice, but that’s what she’s doing,” said the novelist Alexander Chee. “It definitely costs her. It’s not easy to live that way.”