Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is an author and academic. One of the most striking features of Li’s self-presentation in this memoir is her emotional restraint. She repeatedly emphasises her difficulty with overt emotional expression, describing how rarely she cried even after the deaths of her sons. This restraint is presented as a fundamental aspect of who she is which shapes both her behaviour and her prose. Li positions herself as someone who processes experience through thought rather than feeling, and through analysis rather than display. This is reinforced by her frequent turn to philosophy and literature as frameworks through which to approach events she cannot emotionally articulate.

Li depicts herself as acutely self-scrutinising. She repeatedly revisits fears that she was a failed mother, despite abundant evidence in the memoir that she and her husband provided a loving and attentive home. Li does not argue herself out of...