Promsing start to the award-winning The Friend

Started reading Sigrid Nunez's NBA-winning 2018 novel, The Friend, and finding it so far easy to read and curiously enjoyable - curiously, because of the darkness of the plot. The first paragraph as in account of Cambodian women who went blind after suffering rape and torture, and apparently their blindness was a mental not a physical affliction of symptom: They willed themselves not to see. So perhaps that tells us something about the narrator: A writer in NYC who addresses her friend/mentor/one time only lover, a novelist (British?) living in NY who was the narrator's teacher years back and now he is a victim, apparently, of suicide - after a long life as a famous author with three wives left behind and numerous affairs, brief encounters, and even paid encounters in the till. The narrator tells of their long-term friendship and her testy relationships w/ the various wives - we can't help but think she was interested in him, sexually and romantically, more than he was in her and more than she will admit. At the end of the first section, Wife #3 asks the narrator to adopt their Great Dane, which she feels totally incompetent to handle but obliged to do so - so the dog must the the eponymous friend? - and thus the story begins. So is it a literary tell-all - can't help but remind me of Asymmetry, which I was primarily interested in because of the insight into the life of Philip Roth; in this novel, I have no idea if it's a roman a clef - full of NY literary gossip (I'm in!) or a novel of death and trauma (present in the first chapter but lightly passed over) or a girl-meets-dog story (best seller!, movie rights!). Very much liked the first chapter, but I'm unsure how this novel will unwind or develop and whether Nunez will hold my interest over the course of the narrative.