Must I Go

April 15, 2020
A mother grapples with her daughter's death. As in her last novel, Where Reasons End (2019), written shortly after her son killed himself, Li, winner of multiple literary awards, again imagines the effect of a child's suicide, this time, on Lilia Liska, widowed 3 times, who has raised 5 children and the child of her dead daughter, Lucy, who killed herself at age 27, two months after giving birth. Now living in a senior facility where she treats other residents with cold condescension, Lilia devotes herself to reading and annotating the voluminous diaries of Roland Bouley, her former lover, an urbane older man she met when she was 16. Pregnant--with Lucy--from their first encounter, having seen him only 4 times afterward, she has become increasingly obsessed with him over the past several years after acquiring his diaries through the efforts of a local librarian: If she could understand him, she thinks, she might understand their emotionally volatile child. Roland, charming as he was, became a desultory, often self-absorbed bookseller who, Lilia suspects, "revised his diaries for dramatic effect" and "wore his lies like tailored suits." He recounts, in sometimes repetitious detail, assorted lovers and two long-lasting attachments: with a worldly older woman, a forgotten poet who, like Lilia, had lost a child; and with his coolly elegant, self-possessed wife. As much as Lilia insists on her desire to memorialize Roland and to leave his annotated diaries to Lucy's daughter, her real project is keeping Lucy alive. "I haven't stopped arguing with Lucy for thirty-seven years," she writes; "everything in my life is a part of that long argument with Lucy." Although priding herself on her independence and hardness, her reflections reveal abiding grief, loneliness, and regret, which she refuses to confront. Regrets, she remarks, "are like weeds. You kill them before they grow and spread. Willpower is the strongest weed killer." Lilia's bitterness masks vulnerability that too rarely emerges from Li's restrained narrative. A sensitive portrait of a wounded woman.

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May 4, 2020
Li (Where Reasons End) writes with relentless seriousness about a woman taking stock of her past while living in a nursing home. Lilia Liska, 81, works on annotating the collected letters of Roland Bouley, a Canadian writer, and writing a personal history for her favorite granddaughter, Katherine, while most people around her have “droopy lids and fogged-up eyes.” Despite Lilia’s five children and three marriages, Lilia is a solitary soul, harsh and short with family and strangers. Li presents Lilia’s notes on Bouley—whom Lilia had a brief affair with as a girl that resulted in the birth of Katherine’s mother, Lucy—and Lilia’s writings to Katherine as windows into her interior, and the meandering story is laden with tortuous doses of Lilia’s self-reflection and too-clever bon mots. Lucy’s suicide and the toll it takes on Lilia’s first marriage and Bouley’s lifelong romance with the enigmatic poet Sidelle Ogden provide the story’s emotional anchors, but more often than not, with Lilia and Bouley’s stories confined to remembrances of the past, the love, longing, and loss that they recount fails to materialize for the reader. Li adeptly captures the dreamlike, bittersweet qualities of memory, but misses the color and substance that makes that remembrance worthwhile.

June 1, 2020
Missing children loom in Li's latest novel, her second since her teenage son's tragic 2017 suicide, which inspired Where Reasons End (2019). MacArthur genius Li is herself a suicide survivor, as revealed in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017). In her first title with a non-Asian-specific cast (as if creating some semblance of distance), an adult child's suicide propels a multilevel narrative that sprawls through relationships, perspectives, and responses. Octogenarian Lilia takes center stage: she has buried three husbands, had five children, and claims 17 grandchildren. She's never quite understood her firstborn Lucy's suicide at 27, abandoning her two-month-old daughter, Katherine. Decades later, only Katherine is essential to Lilia for as long as she lived. When Lilia discovers the posthumously published diary of Roland Bouley, the peripatetic philanderer with whom Lilia had a brief affair at 16, resulting in Lucy's birth, she claims her own story, penning annotations alongside his tiresome posturing, intending to leave an emboldening legacy for Katherine and Katherine's young daughter, Iola. Once more, Yi confronts unbearable grief and claims agency.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2020

Having outlived three husbands and raised five children, Lilia Liska sits down to read--and finally to annotate with her own distinctive spin on events--the diary of a man with whom she had a brief affair. Meanwhile, she recalls Lucy, the child she lost. From MacArthur fellow Li.

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