“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li notes at the opening of her memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” mimicking the words used by a police officer to inform her of the death by suicide of her son, a little more than six years after the death by suicide of her other, older son. The stunning book, for which Li won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, was first excerpted in The New Yorker. “In this life of mine,” Li writes, “which makes some fiction feel pale and feeble, there are other facts that I need to establish.” Li is also the author of several works of fiction, including the beautiful novel “The Book of Goose,” about a fiercely close friendship between two girls in France. I recently asked her about her reading habits.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
What is the book you might, while writing, want open to any given page?
“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.” The book sits on my right-hand side with my journal, so any time of the day I may reach for it and read a poem, or a stanza, or just a couple of lines on a random page. I’ve often returned to this stanza, which has a clarifying effect for my mind, and the phrase “acutest speech” speaks aptly of my aspiration in writing:
To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanely from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.
Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, has said that she likes the books that put “solid English rhythms” in her head. Are there any works that do that for you?
“Moby-Dick” and Shakespeare’s plays, particularly “Richard II.” My writing voice doesn’t necessarily resemble Melville’s or Shakespeare’s, but their words go on circulating in my head like the best music.
Do you have a favorite book to recommend?
Rebecca West’s novel “The Fountain Overflows,” about the children of an unstable father and an eccentric mother. I’ve purchased many copies to give away to people, and I’ve also recommended it to many more. My late friend Edmund White even wrote this recommendation of mine into his memoir, “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading”: “Yiyun Li told me to read Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows. I’ll always be grateful to her.”
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P.S. Ottessa Moshfegh has apparently finished writing her new book—or so she told Alexa Demie.
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