About midway through her collection of personal essays, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Yiyun Li tells a story. Like nearly every story in the book, it’s unadorned and melancholy, its simplicity at once a demonstration of the virtues of narrative economy and a display of emotional distance. But this story is an extreme version of both — I keep coming back to it, and keep feeling chilled by it. Li has been hospitalized twice in a matter of months for fear she will kill herself, we’ve learned, and now she is sitting on a bench with her young son:
I was aware of his comfort in putting his hand in mine and keeping it there as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It must be, but it occurred to me that I didn’t understand it. I could approximate understanding, but it would only be that of an anthropologist.
It is devastating to read Li write about the inability to find strength, reassurance, or even much sense in holding her child’s hand. And it’s all the worse because Li doesn’t aim to devastate you. Her book contains no symphonically memoir-ish threadings of past and present agonies; it harbors no studious efforts to find poignancy in the clinical literature, as so many recent memoirs of loss and depression do. Li writes that she finds melodrama suspect, evidence of our selective memories striving to put the best face on things. So Dear Friend is Li’s attempt to address suicide and depression absent such rhetorical support beams. What’s left? A remarkable — if very hard to love — memoir of the small comforts of literature and a sizable urge to throw off the baggage of personal history.
This is surprising from Li because the mood — and sometimes the very argument — of Dear Friend contradicts the detail and layers of empathy that mark her fiction. Across two story collections and a pair of novels, she’s mastered a sensitivity to the interweaving of past and present, individual and community, that she often denies in this book. Her 2009 novel, The Vagrants, was a study of the long reach of the execution of a Chinese villager during the Cultural Revolution, but she’d never visited the town in which it was set while she wrote it; visiting later, she feels no particular impact. Her fans admire a scene in her story “Kindness” about a girl who attempts to return hatched chicks to their shells, but Li tells us that the story has no autobiographical basis and sees the need to connect the writer to the work as a kind of affront.
This goes beyond the usual discussions of the authorial fallacy — it’s a kind of denial of personhood itself. Li tells us a fair bit about her family and friendships, particularly her friendship with the late Irish story writer William Trevor, an early mentor. But her two hospitalizations are bereft of detail — we don’t know what the proximate triggers for them were. She quotes from ER notes that say she felt like a burden to loved ones, but she challenges that assessment: “To say a burden is to grant oneself weight in other people’s lives; to call them loved ones is to fake one’s ability to love.”
Dear Friend is punctuated with grim aphorisms like that. Reading is a virtue because “to read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.” Honesty? “A lie sustains life with absoluteness that truth fails to offer.” Memory? “There is no reason to pass on my memories, which I have been guarding all these years, to my children.” Suicide? “I distrust judgments . . . on suicides. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.” Later, she writes of suicide that “a sensible goal is to avoid it” — hardly a thundering condemnation. Dear Friend takes its title from a letter by the novelist Katherine Mansfield, and you can see why Li admired the line so much. It contains a recognition of the urge to connect, through writing if nothing else, while also acknowledging a nearly unbridgeable chasm between two different lives.
Li is aware that the way she frames her life as a reader and a person is unusual — she reports on the brickbats she’s received for refusing to have her work translated into her native Chinese, and acknowledges that she is sometimes marked as “coldhearted and selfish.” She knows, too, that this loose assemblage of thoughts about mortality, identity, and literature (Mansfield and Trevor but also Stefan Zweig, Nabokov, Hardy, Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, and more) is disordered. “Coherence and consistency are not what I’ve been striving for,” she writes. Lacking or denying the familiar comforts of identity and autobiography plainly had consequences for Li. But Dear Friend isn’t a defense of the virtues of that absence so much as a first attempt at exploring what a life might be like without relying on them so heavily. If that does seem coldhearted, the flipside is that the very same attitude that made her a writer: She abandoned a promising career as an immunologist to pursue fiction, in part by neglecting all of those narratives about destiny and appropriate professional trajectories.
“I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me,” she writes — an elevating aphorism if there ever was one. And yet, how much of a clean break can anyone, even Li, make from those scripts? She writes about how she destroyed most of her journals and letters before she left China for America and then adds, parenthetically: “What I could not bring myself to destroy I sealed up and have never opened.” That line is almost as disarming as the one about holding her child’s hand and feeling nothing. Literature is full of departures and disconnection — a hero goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town. Li’s book proffers an extreme vision of that emotional separation, but it’s not one that most readers will find unrecognizable. We’re all on that journey; it’s just that Li is traveling light.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2nwP4tC
Sig Nordal 