Yiyun Li teaches creative writing at Princeton. She is the author of twelve books, most recently Things in Nature Merely Grow.
When I was at nursery school in Beijing in the 1970s, there was a teacher who seemed to find tireless pleasure in tormenting the children. Living in today’s America reminds me of that nursery school. The reigning tyranny; the people who, like my mother, say this can’t be true, life can’t be that terrible; if bad things happen, you are the problem; do not provoke; keep up the hope; things will be better – by the midterms, in four years, some day.
We could think of Yiyun Li’s Must I Go as an experiment in melodrama by a writer who has always struggled with the question of self-exposure, who hates using the word ‘I’ and expunges it from her...
Why write an autobiographical novel? Shouldn’t fiction depart from life and show us a world that’s bigger, weirder and more dramatic than our own? ‘One risks losing...
There are a few facts and dates. I would like to do without them, or fiddle with them, in the sense that the person they govern is a great writer, and would have been a great writer without...
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