Grief, survival, aftermath: these are the themes of Yiyun Li’s new book, a collection of 11 stories written over the past 14 years – a period marked by bereavement, her acknowledgments tells us, including the suicide of her 16-year-old son (after which Li wrote the poleaxing novel Where Reasons End, a writer’s dialogue with her dead child).
Many of the pieces centre on the painful unspooling of memories as life continues. In the title story, first published in the New Yorker in January, an American novelist named Rosalie waits in Amsterdam for a train to Brussels, watching a group of young travellers on the platform “with tall, overfilled backpacks propped beside them like self-important sidekicks”. We wonder if she’s not a little self-important herself, but we soon understand more of the churn of feeling behind her tone: her daughter killed herself on a railway line at the age of 15.
