Fiiction, autofiction, and postmodernism in Nunez's The Friend

The last chapter of Sigrid Nunez's The Friend tells us what happens to "the dog," so, yes, this is a novel about a woman's friendship with her dog and her insights into the life from the canine point of view, or point of smell if you like - a book for dog lovers, and congratulations to her on a readable book that has unsurprisingly found a large readership. But the next to last chapter is extremely strange; this chapter entails the unnamed narrator paying a visit to her friend and mentor, the older writer (also unnamed) who, wait a second, had committed suicide and left his great dane in her care. So in this chapter, the narrator visits the man - still alive, but following a suicide attempt and a convalescence in a mental hospital; apparently, during his time in the hospital, the narrator cared for his god, not a GD but a small dog (a pug I think). So SN could not resist that narrative postmodern trickery: Reader, do not presume or assume that a fictional narration is the same as a memoir (notably, the narrator is involved in preparing a course on auto-fiction and has been reading Knausgaard, as we are reminded several times). The narrator explains, in this penultimate chapter, to her friend that she made use of him, and of his dog, in the work she is writing - but that she'd made his suicide "successful" and translated the dog into a Dane. Oho, so nothing in the first 10 or so chapters actually happened, at least not in the way SN presented it - but then again, who's to say that this penultimate chapter is "true to life," or that any writing is more true than any other? And once we ask that, the only response is: Who cares? Treat all writing as "text" and get on w/ it. But then again, if that's the case: Why not just write the story, why burden us w/ worry about whether the story as told is real or fictive? There's no difference after all - though of course, I admit, I have been curious since page one about the identity of the narrator's writer-friend. I guess the point Nunez is making is: Take this on its own terms as a work of art and as an entertainment. As noted previously, my interest in the recent novel Asymmetry was based entirely on the insight the author provided into the life of Roth, the clear and acknowledged model for the main character; to try to read every novel as such, however, is to race down a blind alley.