Yiyun Li

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

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?

But their disappointment would not last. That year a girl named Françoise Sagan, who was four years older than me, made her name in literary history. The fame of Agnès Moreau, the peasant girl who failed to be transformed into a debutante, was no more than a twinkle of a firefly compared to the meteoric splendor of Mlle Sagan.

Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.

The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential.