Adaptation

New Yorker Nicole Krauss, just out with Forest Dark, her excellent autofictional novel, is trying new things in life, love, and literature. She makes change look extremely appealing.

- Keziah Weir

“There’s always something baffling about having aspects of your life told publicly, not by you, and in ways that are so far from the truth,” Nicole Krauss says, sitting at a table in the sunny back corner of a now-shuttered French Hungarian bistro in Brooklyn called Cafe Dada. “At some point, you can only laugh and drop your hands and just think of it as theater.”

At age 43, Krauss is the author of three acclaimed novels—Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), and Great House (2010)—along with several New Yorker short stories and the just-released, intimately personal novel, Forest Dark (Harper). She has also, over the past decade and change, found herself in a place writers rarely inhabit: the gossipy limelight.

I know that I have to ask her about the obvious similarities between her own recent life story and the book’s plot. Half of Forest Dark (her best novel, and her others were great, it should be said right now) is narrated by an unhappily married 39-year-old author and mother of two—who’s named Nicole, but only once does her name appear in the novel; the rest of the time, she’s “I”—and Krauss’s own divorce has been a subject of titillation in the likes of Gawker and the New York tabloids since 2014. Her ex-husband and the father of her two young sons is the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, whose best-selling debut, Everything Is Illuminated (published when he was 25), and subsequent perpetual success have nonetheless earned him widespread opprobrium, dubbed “Schadenfoer” by one wag. Krauss has barely talked about her marriage in the past, let alone its demise.