Июнь Ли - Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Copyright © 2017 by Yiyun Li

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

“Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life” was originally published in

A Public Space

and reprinted in

The Best American Essays 2014.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred Music:

Excerpt from “Five Hundred Miles,” words and music by Hedy West, copyright © 1964 (Renewed) Unichappell Music, Inc., and Atzal Music, Inc. All rights administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

Faber and Faber Limited:

Excerpt from

Letters to Monica

by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite. Philip Larkin’s letters copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Philip Larkin; Monica Jones’s letters copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Monica Jones; selection, introduction, and editorial matter copyright © 2010 by Anthony Thwaite. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.

Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and A.

M. Heath & Co. Ltd.:

Excerpts from

All Will Be Well: A Memoir

by John McGahern, copyright © 2005 by John McGahern. Rights in Canada are controlled by A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Li, Yiyun, author.

Title: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life / Yiyun Li.

Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016017675| ISBN 9780399589096 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399589119 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Li, Yiyun, 1972– —Mental health. | Authors, American—21st century—Biography. | Depressed persons—United States—Biography. | Autobiography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | PSYCHOLOGY / Psychopathology / Depression.

Classification: LCC PS3612.I16 Z46 2017 | DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23

LC record available at

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017675

Ebook ISBN 9780399589119

randomhousebooks.com

Cover design: Rachel Ake

v4.1

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Amongst People

Memory Is a Melodrama from Which No One Is Exempt

Two Lives

Amongst Characters

To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture

Either/Or: A Chorus of Miscellany

Reading William Trevor

Afterword: On Being a Flat Character, and Inventing Alternatives

A Partial List of Books

Dedication

Acknowledgments

By Yiyun Li

About the Author

There is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless.

—Amy Leach,

Things That Are

She had always enjoyed waking people who were asleep; and indeed it is as great an alteration to the state of a fellow-creature that we can make short of killing them or giving birth to them.

—Rebecca West,

This Real Night

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

1.

My first encounter with before and after was in one of the fashion magazines my friends told me to subscribe to when I came to America. I duly followed their advice—I had an anthropologist’s fascination with America then. I had never seen a glossy magazine, and the print and paper quality, not to mention the trove of perfumes waiting to be unfolded, made me wonder how the economics of the magazine worked, considering I paid no more than a dollar for an issue.

My favorite column was on the last page of the magazine, and it featured celebrity makeovers—hairstyle and hair color, for instance—with two bubbles signifying before and after. I didn’t often have an opinion about the transformation, but I liked the definitiveness of that phrase, before and after, with nothing muddling the in-between.

After years of living in America, I still feel a momentary elation whenever I see advertisements for weight-loss programs, teeth-whitening strips, hair-loss treatments, or plastic surgery with the contrasting effects shown under before and after. The certainty in that pronouncement—for each unfortunate or inconvenient situation, there is a solution to make it no longer be—both attracts and perplexes me. Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

2.

I was leaving to teach class when an acquaintance who lived across the country in New Hampshire called my office. She had traveled to a nearby city. I talked to her for no more than two minutes before telling my husband to go find her. He spent twelve hours with her, canceled her business appointments, and saw to it that she flew back home. Two weeks later her husband called and said she had jumped out of her office on a Sunday evening. He asked me to attend her memorial service. I thought for a long time and decided not to.

Our memories tell more about now than then. Doubtless the past is real. There is no shortage of evidence: photos, journals, letters, old suitcases. But we choose and discard from an abundance of evidence what suits us at the moment. There are many ways to carry the past with us: to romanticize it, to invalidate it, to furnish it with revised or entirely fictionalized memories. The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.

I don’t want the present to judge the past, so I don’t want to ponder my absence at her memorial service. We had come to this country around the same time. When I told her that I was going to quit science to become a writer, she seemed curious, but her husband said that it was a grave mistake. Why do you want to make your life difficult? he asked.

3.

I have had a troublesome relationship with time. The past I cannot trust because it could be tainted by my memory. The future is hypothetical and should be treated with caution. The present—what is the present but a constant test: in this muddled in-between one struggles to understand what about oneself has to be changed, what accepted, what preserved. Unless the right actions are taken, one seems never to pass the test to reach the after.

4.

After the second of two hospital stays following a difficult time, I went to a program for those whose lives have fallen apart. Often someone would say—weeping, shaking, or dry eyed—that he or she wished to go back in time and make everything right again.

I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born.

I was quiet most of the time, until I was told I was evasive and not making progress. But my pain was my private matter, I thought; if I could understand and articulate my problems I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.