Yiyun Li

There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing

t is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had

What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?

For a while I read Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks to distract myself. “Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life,” she wrote in an entry. I cried when I read the line. It reminds me of the boy from years ago who could not stop sending the designs of his dreams in his letters. It reminds me too why I do not want to stop writing. The books one writes—past and present and future—are they not trying to say the same thing: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life? What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance, if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

I am not an autobiographical writer—one cannot be without a solid and explicable self—and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

The news of her death arrived in a letter from my mother, the last of my family still living in Saint Rémy

Fabienne died in 1966, at twenty-seven.

Earl loves me, and I love being married to him.

Last spring, I acquired my first two, a pair of Toulouse geese, and this year I purchased a pair of Chinese geese.

They call me Mother Goose