Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I have loved Yiyun Li ever since I first read Gold Boy, Emerald Girl back in 2013. I followed that up with the eviseceratingly tragic yet beautiful The Vagrants about a year ago. It is hard to believe that English isn’t her first language - she shares Conrad’s ability to make amazing art in a language she didn’t grow up speaking. As this book reveals, she intentionally chose to write only in English, and never in her native Chinese. 

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life was published in 2017, five years after Yiyun had a serious mental breakdown, attempted suicide twice, and landed in the hospital for her own protection. The book itself is a series of essays wherein she explores her own psyche, her breakdown, her past, and her relationship to literature and writing. At least, that is the best I can do to explain the book, because it isn’t really like anything I have read before. And it is really, really good. Her writing is so luminous, and simultaneously oblique and devastatingly revealing, it draws you in. 

Yiyun has said in the past that she is “not an autobiographical writer.” That is, her stories are not about her or people she knew. But, as she admits in this book, that was a lie. I don’t think it was a lie in the sense of being actually untrue. She doesn’t write stories with her as a character. But if I am reading her essay on this issue correctly, her story is told through the psyches of her characters, not their situations, plots, or choices. And that feels right, after reading this book. She is a very private person, and her characters tend to keep their emotions mostly out of sight. But, just as her stories reveal the emotions of her characters in such flayed reality that you want to look away, her essays in this book are as introspective and self-revealing as anything I have ever read. I mean, you can see the viscera and throbbing arteries of her emotional experiences. It is hard to take at times, which is why I read the book slowly. The reality is just too real to be looked in the face. 

In an interesting coincidence, this is the second book I have read in as many months that had autobiographical explorations of depression and suicide. The other was a fictional work, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. While the two are very different - psychologically different too - the share that uncomfortable look into mental illness. As an example, Emezi’s character has multiple personalities, tends to be loud and act out, and seems like a being on fire more often than not. It is a violent vision of suicide, of self destruction, and inner torment. Yiyun’s on the other hand, is that of a person who is quiet, pleasant, polite, thoughtful, ridiculously erudite - but who is dying internally, filled with a rather quiet self-loathing and distaste for living. It’s really spooky the way she writes it. 

As I noted in the former review, I am not particularly prone to either depression or suicidal thoughts. I’ve been in a few dark places, but they tend to be connected to circumstances, not major depression. And also, I joke that I am more homicidal than suicidal. (Don’t worry, I’m not homicidal. I’m not a violent person, but more of a fuzzball with a smart mouth. I just tend to get angry rather than depressed.) So these books were really more about seeing into the mind of someone else, and recognizing some of the darkness, if not its manifestations. It is an indication of how good the writing is that these books felt so real and familiar - and how deeply they messed with my emotions while reading. 

Yiyun takes an interesting approach to things in the book. For the most part, she doesn’t talk directly about what happened or what she did. Rather, she talks about other writers. Some of these are ones I might have guessed: Turgenev, Chekhov, Marianne Moore, Stefan Zweig. But some were a bit surprising, such as Thomas Hardy. Wait, what?? And some others which I haven’t read, and were not that familiar with, such as Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, and William Trevor. (The last of which she formed a friendship with, and who gets most of a chapter to himself.) Yiyun traces her love affair with literature from her childhood through the present, and you can see exactly how she ended up going from a promising career in science to taking the leap into writing. 

Rather than try further to explain the book, let me mention a few quotes that I wrote down as particularly insightful. 

After years of living in America, I still feel a momentary elation whenever I see advertisements for weight-loss programs, teeth-whitening strips, hair-loss treatments, or plastic surgery with the contrasting effects shown under before and after. The certainty in that pronouncement--for each unfortunate or inconvenient situation, there is a solution to make it no longer be--both attracts and perplexes me. Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself. 

Cue a bit of Clint Black? What makes this a particularly great insight is her understanding of the American mythos, and the way we built an economy on the lie that we can become fundamentally different people if we consume the right way.  

There is another moment when Yiyun recalls a visit to Ireland during a heat wave, and notes that, like music, weather can be a crucial part of a memory - and trigger it. 

Children, unlike their elders, do not converse about the weather. It is a fact to them, connected to the present only. Is it because weather can represent too much that it is often reduced to small talk? Weather gives experiences a place in time: a mood in which to inset a memory, a variable or a constant when comparing now and then. 

It’s bits like that which separate competent writers from the best, and I can only dream of being able to write - and observe - like that. Or how about this recalling of what reading meant to her during her deeply unpleasant time in the Chinese Army? 

I did not see myself in Scarlett O’Hara; or Anna Karenina, or Tess Durbeyfield or Jane Erye; nor did I look for myself in Jean-Christophe or Nick Adams or Paul Morel or the old man fighting the sea. To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence. 

That last sentence is amazing. And I think that, while I am not so inwardly turned as Yiyun, I get that feeling. Perhaps it is how introverts tend to read? 

Running through the book is Yiyun’s own history, which certainly contributed to her breakdown. Her mother was, to put it mildly, abusive. And probably mentally ill. Yiyun was the favorite child, so her sister probably had it worse, but the things Yiyun tells of her childhood make it clear that her mother abused everyone in the family, including her father. Some of the things said and done are just horrifying, such as her mother telling her that she “deserved the ugliest death” because she didn’t love her mother enough, and on the day she got married, telling her that she had left her with only the hope for Li’s divorce. I mean, it’s bad, and yet Yiyun remains haunted and drawn to her mother. In this context, and the fact that her parents’ memories - even though she doesn’t share them - still affect her in unexpected ways, she quotes Ralph Ellison: “Things were not supposed to be this way.” 

One of the chapters is largely about Turgenev, who had a similarly abusive and possessive mother. How about this fact? After disowning Turgenev’s brother for marrying, and then acting indifferent when the children of that marriage died in the same year, she told Turgenev, “I alone conceived you. You are an egoist of egoist. I know your character better than you know yourself...I prophesy that you will not be loved by your wife.” 

Ouch. But Yiyun’s mother said something similar to her: “I don’t even need to lay my eyes on you to know everything about you because you came from my body.” Apparently, she said this to the young Li regularly. She then asks, “How do we live with what we have, unhaunted?” And the answer is clearly that we cannot. We remain haunted. 

I must admit, a good bit of this resonated with me. My mother was not even in the same class as these controlling and abusive mothers, but she was damaged by her own childhood, and never really was able to transition from the mother of children to the mother of adults in a healthy manner. I did hear all too often during my teens that she feared I would marry a sweet girl and run roughshod over her. In the actual event, I married a strong, confident, and assertive woman, and I am pretty sure my mom was disappointed, which is why she eventually antagonized my wife until she was unwilling to waste time on my parents at all. So yes, I am very much haunted, and have to live with what I have. Things were not supposed to be this way. 

Returning again near the end of the book to her mother, Yiyun gives yet another facet of the issue. 

Writing is the only part of my life I have taken beyond my mother’s storytelling. I have avoided writing in an autobiographical voice because I cannot bear that it could be overwritten by my mother’s omniscience. I can easily see all other parts of my life in her narrative: my marriage, my children, my past. Just as she demands to come into my narrative, I demand to be left out of hers. There is no way to change that; not a happy ending, not even an ending is possible.

Perhaps the most difficult and haunting part of the book is Yiyun’s description of her never-ending quest to be invisible, to not matter, to prove that nothing matters. And it is clear that she wants to be visible, to be loved, to matter, and to prove that everything matters. There is a line in which she perhaps allows herself a glimpse of why. 

Nothing matters. The belief was fallible, but I knew from experience that absence is more reliable than presence, and a lie sustains life with absoluteness that truth fails to offer. 

There are layers to unpack in that one. Most obvious is that Yiyun finds that reality leads her toward suicide, and that some form of self-delusion appears necessary to prevent that. This is some crazy philosophical stuff, to be sure, and it isn’t just her. (As the book makes clear.) But I think too that she hits on a truth about...truth. Truth is complicated and messy and human and ambiguous. A lie is absolute. Lies tell you that everything can be summed up in one rule, one statement, one “truth.” And this is why cults thrive and hate multiplies and people embrace obvious untruths. It is far easier - and simpler because it is absolute - to say “my problems are the fault of those people,” than to look at the complexities of life. Far easier to exterminate the Jews, or deport immigrants, than to address the layers of kludge and rules and laws and systems which have choked the average person. Finding true solutions is always hard work - it is the work of reformation, not revolution - while “solutions” are easy to find. They have an absoluteness that truth cannot offer. On a related note, this observation is interesting, particularly in the context of whether wishing to escape suffering is selfish or not. (Many consider suicide selfish, but are other methods of escape likewise selfish?) 

It is easier to take something away than to give. Giving requires understanding and imagination; taking away requires only resolution and action.

This too ties back: giving - like truth - is complicated, and requires understanding the one to whom one gives, and imagination in finding a mutual good. That’s the complexity of truth. And the lie is easier - just take things away from other people. Send them back. Lock them up. Tell them to shut up. 

In the same chapter is an unexpected insight, which caught me off guard. I mentioned that I was not expecting Thomas Hardy to make an appearance. I was doubly not expecting to find a quote from Phillip Larkin about Jude the Obscure and the ensuing discussion to change my perspective on that book. Yiyun points out something that bothered me about the book: 

Sue is so incoherent that she raises in my mind the question of believability. Not that I don’t believe her as a character--a complaint one sometimes hears as a criticism of a less successful character--but I don’t believe a character can achieve inexplicability as she has. “Really too irritating not to have been a real person” was Larkin’s conclusion, and some biographers have suggested Hardy’s first wife as a model. 

This is true. Characters in stories are not allowed the luxury of being inexplicable. They have to do things for reasons, and Sue seems to have no reasons behind her behavior. She makes no sense. But this is, perhaps, the way a lot of people in real life are, if you think about it. Not everyone, clearly, but enough. The whole passage on Jude and Sue in particular, is really insightful. Even though I still dislike what Hardy did with her, I can understand it better. 

The chapter on language was also fascinating. Yiyun essentially “abandoned” (her words) three key things: her mother, her motherland, and her mother tongue. She compares herself to Nabokov, who likewise had to write in a non-native language. He did it for different reasons, though, and with reluctance. Yiyun did it intentionally, for rather complex reasons (although the fact that her mother cannot read English is one of them.) I can’t even begin to duplicate the extended exploration of this, but I think this line is a good start:

I feel a tinge of guild when I imagine Nabokov’s woe. Like all intimacies, the intimacy between one and one’s mother tongue can demand more than one is willing to give, or what one is capable of giving. If I allow myself to be honest, I would borrow from Nabokov for a stronger and stranger statement. My private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody’s concern, is that I disowned my native language.

There are eight chapters, but also an “afterword” which seems in many ways to be its own chapter. I guess that is a matter of perspective. In any case, it has an amazing paragraph that I think makes a good way to finish this post. 

One cannot be an adept writer of one’s life; nor can one be a discerning reader of that tale. Not equipped with a novelist’s tools to create plots or maneuver pacing, to speak omnisciently or abandon an inconvenient point of view, to adjust time’s linearity and splice the less connected moments, the most interesting people among us, I often suspect, are flatter than the flattest character in a novel. Not only do we not have any alternatives, we discredit them. It has to be so--this indisputable conviction is often at the foundation of our decisions, including the most impulsive or the most catastrophic. It is easier to be certain of one thing than to be uncertain of a hundred; easier for there to be one is than many might have beens.

Yiyun Li has written one short story collection and two novels that I have yet to read. I was reminded again with this book why I love her writing so much. I definitely have her other works on my list, and I truly hope that she stays with us for a long time. 

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This interview in The Guardian in relation to this book is pretty fascinating. 

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A tragic footnote: soon after this book was published, Yiyun's teenaged son committed suicide. The amount of pain in this family of generations is lacerating. I wish I had a cure to offer, but life and humans are too complicated for simple answers.

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

Source of book: I own this.

The Possessed should not be confused with Dostoevsky's book of the same name. Okay, the “Book Formerly Known As The Possessed” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The title is usually translated Demons these days, or The Devils. It also should not be confused with the movies of that title in 1977, 2009, and 2018. This book is a memoir written by Elif Batuman, and is named in reference to the novel, which does make an extended appearance in the book.

My wife bought this book a number of years ago - probably close to when it came out, although I don’t remember exactly how she discovered it. She read it, and found it interesting, so I put it on my list of books to eventually read. It seemed to fit in between other books this year. (I try to avoid reading books on the same topic consecutively. I prefer to have a balanced diet. And, to be sure, this book was like nothing I have read this year.)

Batuman is the child of Turkish immigrants, graduated from Harvard and Stanford with an eventual doctorate in comparative literature, and wrote extensively for the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. This year, she released a novel (which is kind of ironic, considering her musings on novel writing in the memoir.) 

The book is about her time as post-grad student studying Russian literature. It is a rewrite of several essays in magazines, along with some new material.

In what is a pretty ironic twist, Batuman failed in her primary goal, which was to get paid to study Russian literature in Russia. Instead, she ended up settling for studying Uzbek literature in Samarkand. In some ways, this made sense. Batuman is fluent in Turkish (although perhaps in Russian too now), and Uzbek is essentially a Soviet amalgam of Turkish dialects from the area.

What follows in this book is her story of her adventures and misadventures on this trip. From her host, who pretty systematically cheated her out of any amenity including working plumbing, to her visits to sites connected with the great Russian novelists, to the eccentric and interesting people her area of study brought into her life, the book is filled with engrossing incidents. There are also sections where she discusses different Russian classics (including the title work) and how they fit with both her experiences and her evolving view of life, literature, and writing.

I’m not even going to try to summarize it beyond that. It is a fairly rambling, episodic memoir - which is kind of how life is anyway. I would say it helps to be familiar with the major Russian writers: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, and their major works. It also doesn’t hurt to have some knowledge of literary theory, as well as history.  I am by no means an expert (and have yet to read some of the books mentioned), but I have spent some time with many of the books. I would say that this book has been some incentive to make sure I put some Russian authors on my list every year.

One thing that I learned from this book was that Turkish and Russian are related - I am not a language scholar, so this connection wasn’t something that I was aware of. Apparently, the Soviets (the Russian ones, naturally), weren’t eager to acknowledge this fact, and tried to cover it up.

Also fascinating in this connection was the origins of the various countries which seemingly magically appeared after the fall of the USSR. (I remember sitting with my brother, going through our very first version of Microsoft Encarta and reading about all these “stans” which constituted south-central Asia. Kyrgyzstan had both the best paucity of vowels and the most interesting tune for its national anthem.) These never really showed up on a map before the rise of the USSR. So where did they come from?

Batuman explains at the time that England was colonizing India, Tsarist Russia decided it needed to make a countermove. It took over the fringes of the Ottoman Empire - a region of tribal groups speaking various Turkish dialects known to outsiders as “Turkestan,” and classified the residents according to a fairly fictional and arbitrary set of groups. The “Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz” didn’t really exist in any recognizable way, but the Russians nonetheless pounded these round pegs into square holes, and annexed the whole thing. These groupings became geographical SSRs, and when the Soviet Union disintegrated, these newish nations emerged as the closest thing to modern nations these regions had known. As part of this, the Uzbek language (and others, I believe) were essentially created from an awkward mashup of dialects, and forced on the people. Not that this is much different from the way national boundaries in the Middle East were drawn by the Allies after the world wars.

I’ll mention a few passages that I particularly found amusing, although these are by no means all of them.

One concerns Isaac Babel, who I wasn’t familiar with - probably because he was exterminated in Stalin’s Great Purge, despite being part of the Communist revolution, and his name and works removed from Soviet records. (This came to light in the 1990s. Also, he ran afoul of the regime primarily because he had an affair with the wife of an NKVD boss. Not his most intelligent move.) Anyway, Babel’s works are mentioned throughout the book. One really stuck with me. Batuman was reading Red Cavalry while baking a Black Forest cake. Apparently, the cake was a disaster.

As Babel immortalized for posterity the military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign, so he immortalized for me the culinary embarrassment of this cake, which came out of the oven looking like an old hat and which, after I had optimistically treated it with half a two-dollar bottle of Kirschwasser, produced the final pansensory impression of an old hat soaked in cough syrup.

Leaving aside the great word picture, I noticed it because my wife makes a fantastic Black Forest cake, complete with a more moderate amount of Kirschwasser, which is pretty much everything this cake was not.

There are a number of quotes from Uzbek (for lack of a better word) poets in this book. After all, Batuman was ostensibly in Samarkand to research Uzbek literature. As noted above, this was a total misnomer, and she had to settle for the writers native to what would eventually become Uzbekistan. One of these is the poet Navoi. I am not sure exactly how these poems sounded in the original language, of course, but there is a certain unintentional comedy factor as Batuman renders them. And I am someone who has a love for poetry. Here is an example that made me smile.

Was it my heart - a bird - that was caught in your locks that unfortunate night,

Or was it bats of some kind?

Remember, the sultan dooms to death even his closest friend

If he learns the latter has secreted away money from the treasury.

Speak, Navoi, if love has not yet crippled your soul -

Why do you spew blood whenever you sob?

There are a few more quotes throughout the book, and they are a bit unusual to say the least, to someone who is more familiar with the English poetic tradition.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of this book. It was interesting, amusing, and kept my interest. But it is also not for everyone. There are certainly moments where I think she might have been a bit more concise. And also moments when I think she wallows in her personal feelings and romantic drama. But it is a memoir, so you expect that along with the fun stories.

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For what it’s worth, I read a bunch of Tolstoy short stories in my teens - mostly the parable or religious ones. Since then, I have continued to read from my collection. You can read my impression of his stories about the Crimean War here. A couple years ago, I finally got to War and Peace. I hope to read Anna Karenina one of these days.

But, the strongest impression was when I read his three best known novellas. The Death of Ivan Ilych was good, but it was Family Happiness and The Kreutzer Sonata which marked me deeply, upending a lot of what I had thought about sex and marriage. It was really my first introduction to a viciously anti-sex and anti-woman philosophy - except that after I read it, I couldn’t help noticing how much negative influence Tolstoy (and St. Augustine) had on Evangelical teachings on sex and sexuality. These books also rather confirmed my suspicions that marriage wasn’t just a matter of following the right formula or gritting one’s teeth and being loving. Compatibility - sexual and otherwise - was crucial. It is no accident that I intentionally talked about the philosophy of sex before I ever asked my wife out. Fortunately, she is both a good sport and a fellow lover of books, literature, and deep discussions. We are, shall we say, a match.

My brother and I both read The Brothers Karamazov in our late teens, and both enjoyed and found ourselves a bit bewildered by it. I listed the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” as an honorable mention in my list of most influential books. I have returned to that chapter multiple times, and think that it is still the best thing ever written on toxic religion. I have also read Crime and Punishment and Notes From Underground, both of which were fascinating.

I still have yet to read Gogol and Pushkin. They are on my list.

Whatever my deficits in Russian Literature, I have played a fairly good number of the great Russian classical works, both 19th Century and Soviet era. Comparing the literature to the music is a fun exercise.

Probably the oddest Russian book I have read, though, is The Master and Margarita.