With the title of her new short story collection, the first since 2010’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li offers us a typically finespun hint at what we’re in for. The stories in Wednesday’s Child take as their subject the state of motherhood: its weight and its potency; the questions it raises, and the sacrifices and sublimations it exacts.
But more importantly, these haunting, harrowing tales are – without exception, and whether their characters are prepared to acknowledge it or not – full to the brim with woe. In Li’s telling, it is loss – of self, of love, of youth; most agonisingly of all, of children – that is motherhood’s defining characteristic, and grief for these losses quietly but entirely saturates the collection.
