Yiyun Li, photographed by Denise J. Applewhite/Princeton University.
Yiyun Li on Comic Books, First Drafts, and Writing Children
Yiyun Li tells me she loves to cut. Like a kindly doctor with a nervous patient, or an assassin, she sets the reader at ease with the gentle manner of her deceptively simple prose, then jabs them in the arm, or the gut, mercifully, with sharp, poignant needles of beautiful, raw humanity. The magic of the depths she can reach with such brevity is perhaps a trick of her editorial instinct, to cut away from the prose until the reader recognizes the absence on the page as something that’s alive within itself. In her latest story collection, Wednesday’s Child, Li draws pictures of lives suspended in various stages of grief, mourning, and loss, but, because this is the nature of loss, her characters are often contending with something palpable and tangible that exists off the page, lost to the void.
