Grief makes us illegible to others. And sometimes, in trying to survive it, we make ourselves illegible on purpose. In her recent essay in The New Yorker, “The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons,” Yiyun Li writes about the unimaginable: losing both her sons, six years apart, each by suicide. The prose is restrained, sparse to the point of frictionless. There are no crescendos of pain, no indulgence in...
The Exquisite Distance: Yiyun Li and the Unforgiving Mirror of Grief
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