I am living. I remember you.

 

I have to say, I've gotten off to a good start this year. In the first three weeks, I've managed to read about seven books. That's something! I have plenty more books to read (I've just ordered another joblot from BookXcess and one from Kino, because it prompted me, saying I would lose a chunk of my vouchers in two days - I hadn't realised I had all these vouchers, and there was a book I wanted, because I read about it in the cover of Yiyun Li's memoir, which I'm talking about here, so...)

I first read Yiyun Li in an article in the New Yorker and I can't tell you how much I loved the article. It was about always smiling because if she gave in to tears, she would never stop weeping. It was about the suicide of her 16-year-old son Vincent and life after the unfathomable and unimaginable.

I immediately bought her latest novel, Must I Go? but didn't enjoy it the way I had the article. So I thought I'd get her memoir instead. 

The funny thing about Li writing a memoir is that even here, she tries to evade biography. She says you can't figure her out from reading her characters. In fact, this memoir, written over two years, is about her trying to come to terms with her suicidal impulses. In the first bit, she seems almost to defend the suicidal tendency.

(I wonder how she felt about that when Vincent killed himself. Was it still defensible?)

And many chapters are conversations with different authors -- through reading their notebooks, diaries, letters -- Stefan Zweig (who killed himself in Brazil with his wife Lotte), Katherine Mansfield, William Trevor, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bowen -- it is very rich and intellectually satisfying and here and there, she does release a nugget of personal information.

From this memoir, we learn that her son (the one who was to kill himself) was actually something of a genius. He read Les Miserables four times, back to back, when he was only 12. I remember reading it at half past 20 and someone, an editor of an august newspaper, being so impressed that I had.

She talks about rejecting her mother tongue, something deeply personal that everyone has an opinion about. She talks about stumbling upon an article about herself when she wins a prize for writing in England in a Chinese newspaper, talking about betrayal. She talks about trying to tell her mother that she was unfair to her sister who was always made to feel less smart and pretty, and how her mother reacted by bursting into tears and talking about how she had bought this same sister new year clothes when she didn't have money. She talks about growing up with a mad mother and a gentle father. She talks about leaving.

The book is a mixture of the confessional and intellectual distance. She quotes copiously from the novels, letters and conversations of her fellow writers.

I liked it. I found it a satisfying read.