An interpretation of Sigrid Nunez's The Friend

My interpretation of Sigrid Nunez's novel The Friend, which I have nearly finished reading (things could change in final chapters): Her mentor/writer/friend who committed suicide and to whom the narrator speaks in this second-person novel is full of lamentations and misgivings about the writer's life: students today are stupid, nobody reads novels anymore, novelists are petty and competitive, any good novel is unappreciated, and so on. The (unamed) writer bequeaths to the (unnamed) narrator, also a writer and professor of writing though far less successful than her mentor, his Great Dane, which she takes in and over time comes to love, and much of the novel is about dogs and our relationships w/ dogs. So in effect the writer (let's call him) gives the narrator a gift that will completely chnage not only her attitude toward dogs (she is a "cat person") but material for her writing, which had foundered - and that material is the book that we are reading. Had this novel been a mourning of her lost mentor and a Jeremiad about the state of contemporary fiction, who would read it? (Me, maybe.) But no, she has written a novel about - dogs! Who won't read that? And of course this has become her breakthrough novel and winner of at least 1 top literary prize. And probably movie rights are in the works. So I don't know if there's any autobiographical element behind The Friend (whose title has two possible referents, man and dog) - I definitely don't know whom the "writer' is meant to represent, if anyone - but if there is a story behind the dog-bequest Nunez has made the most of it - and if the entire work is fictional, she has come up w/ a rare concoction of an esoteric, insular novel that will appeal, that has appealed, to a readership far beyond the narrow scope of "literary fiction."