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Must I Go
Cover of Must I Go
Must I Go
A Novel
by Yiyun Li
“One of our major novelists” (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel.
“Yiyun Li is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.”—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE AND ESQUIRE
Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.
Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. She returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter Lucy. This is a novel about life in all its messy glory, and of a life lived, by the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With great candor and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.
“One of our major novelists” (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel.
“Yiyun Li is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.”—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE AND ESQUIRE
Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.
Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. She returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter Lucy. This is a novel about life in all its messy glory, and of a life lived, by the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With great candor and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.
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  • From the book

    “Posterity, take notice!”

    The exhortation, or the plea, appeared twenty-three times in Roland Bouley’s diaries. Every time Lilia read the line, she reassured him: Yes, Roland, I’m here, taking notice. If one of her children in their younger years had asked her not to ever die, Lilia would have spoken with equal certainty: I never will. But that was a promise made to be broken. Roland had not asked for the impossible, only the eternal. Who else could be his posterity but her?

    The single volume of his diaries, over seven hundred pages, was the only book Roland had published. He had culled sixty years of entries, and left instructions to have them printed by a friend’s press. He had left everything to Peter and Anne Wilson, his wife Hetty’s favorite niece.

    Lilia disapproved of the Wilsons. Resented them wholeheartedly. They had edited Roland’s diaries from three volumes into one, inserting ellipses where records should have been kept intact. The first time she read the book, and Peter Wilson’s introduction that justified the culling, Lilia had sent a letter to Aubrey Lane Press, the address a P.O. box in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. What arrogance to say that Roland’s journals were “at times repetitive.” Life is repetitive, she wrote. Loyalty to a dead man should be the editor’s foremost requirement. She had received no reply.

    Three volumes into one: These people might as well take a second job as cooks, whisking and reducing Roland’s lifework into a bowl of gravy. In his introduction, Peter Wilson flaunted his editorial skill, praising his discretion in deciding what to omit and his moral integrity in respecting Roland’s wishes without causing undue distress for the family members.

    What distress? What family? Hetty had not given Roland any children. More than half of the finished book was about Roland’s marriage. If the Wilsons thought that, by omission, they could make Hetty the center of Roland’s life, they had made fools of themselves. Anyone reading Roland’s diaries would know that Sidelle Ogden was the only one for whom he had made any space in his heart. That, for a man who had mostly only loved himself, was a feat.

    Lilia did not mind. A woman’s value, in her opinion, was not measured by the quality of the men in her life, but by the quality of the women in the lives of those men. Lilia, though she appeared only briefly in Roland’s journals, would have made any woman proud.

    Lilia had met Roland four times in her life. Had she told people that she had been rereading his diaries for years now, they would have called her crazy—man crazy, book crazy—but how wrong people often were. A story is not always a love story. A book is much more than just pages of words.

    But the world was full of people like the Wilsons who understood nothing. They thought that they were humoring Roland by putting some pages of his diaries into print. They felt no qualms about forgetting Roland. Typical of him to entrust his posterity to people who dedicated so little of their lives to remembering him.

    “I-m-b-o-d-y,” Lilia said, spelling her name out for the two children. Patience was not her virtue, but if she had enough to live for eighty-one years, there was no reason she could not spare some for the third graders. Or were they in second grade? It didn’t matter. She would long be dead before they would grow up into something remotely interesting. Though even that meager prospect was not guaranteed. Lilia was the oldest among six siblings, and she had raised five children, who had given her seventeen...

About the Author-
  • Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Reviews-
  • Kirkus

    April 15, 2020
    A mother grapples with her daughter's death. As in her last novel, Where Reasons End (2019), written shortly after her son killed himself, Li, winner of multiple literary awards, again imagines the effect of a child's suicide, this time, on Lilia Liska, widowed 3 times, who has raised 5 children and the child of her dead daughter, Lucy, who killed herself at age 27, two months after giving birth. Now living in a senior facility where she treats other residents with cold condescension, Lilia devotes herself to reading and annotating the voluminous diaries of Roland Bouley, her former lover, an urbane older man she met when she was 16. Pregnant--with Lucy--from their first encounter, having seen him only 4 times afterward, she has become increasingly obsessed with him over the past several years after acquiring his diaries through the efforts of a local librarian: If she could understand him, she thinks, she might understand their emotionally volatile child. Roland, charming as he was, became a desultory, often self-absorbed bookseller who, Lilia suspects, "revised his diaries for dramatic effect" and "wore his lies like tailored suits." He recounts, in sometimes repetitious detail, assorted lovers and two long-lasting attachments: with a worldly older woman, a forgotten poet who, like Lilia, had lost a child; and with his coolly elegant, self-possessed wife. As much as Lilia insists on her desire to memorialize Roland and to leave his annotated diaries to Lucy's daughter, her real project is keeping Lucy alive. "I haven't stopped arguing with Lucy for thirty-seven years," she writes; "everything in my life is a part of that long argument with Lucy." Although priding herself on her independence and hardness, her reflections reveal abiding grief, loneliness, and regret, which she refuses to confront. Regrets, she remarks, "are like weeds. You kill them before they grow and spread. Willpower is the strongest weed killer." Lilia's bitterness masks vulnerability that too rarely emerges from Li's restrained narrative. A sensitive portrait of a wounded woman.

    COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Publisher's Weekly

    May 4, 2020
    Li (Where Reasons End) writes with relentless seriousness about a woman taking stock of her past while living in a nursing home. Lilia Liska, 81, works on annotating the collected letters of Roland Bouley, a Canadian writer, and writing a personal history for her favorite granddaughter, Katherine, while most people around her have “droopy lids and fogged-up eyes.” Despite Lilia’s five children and three marriages, Lilia is a solitary soul, harsh and short with family and strangers. Li presents Lilia’s notes on Bouley—whom Lilia had a brief affair with as a girl that resulted in the birth of Katherine’s mother, Lucy—and Lilia’s writings to Katherine as windows into her interior, and the meandering story is laden with tortuous doses of Lilia’s self-reflection and too-clever bon mots. Lucy’s suicide and the toll it takes on Lilia’s first marriage and Bouley’s lifelong romance with the enigmatic poet Sidelle Ogden provide the story’s emotional anchors, but more often than not, with Lilia and Bouley’s stories confined to remembrances of the past, the love, longing, and loss that they recount fails to materialize for the reader. Li adeptly captures the dreamlike, bittersweet qualities of memory, but misses the color and substance that makes that remembrance worthwhile.

  • Booklist

    June 1, 2020
    Missing children loom in Li's latest novel, her second since her teenage son's tragic 2017 suicide, which inspired Where Reasons End (2019). MacArthur genius Li is herself a suicide survivor, as revealed in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017). In her first title with a non-Asian-specific cast (as if creating some semblance of distance), an adult child's suicide propels a multilevel narrative that sprawls through relationships, perspectives, and responses. Octogenarian Lilia takes center stage: she has buried three husbands, had five children, and claims 17 grandchildren. She's never quite understood her firstborn Lucy's suicide at 27, abandoning her two-month-old daughter, Katherine. Decades later, only Katherine is essential to Lilia for as long as she lived. When Lilia discovers the posthumously published diary of Roland Bouley, the peripatetic philanderer with whom Lilia had a brief affair at 16, resulting in Lucy's birth, she claims her own story, penning annotations alongside his tiresome posturing, intending to leave an emboldening legacy for Katherine and Katherine's young daughter, Iola. Once more, Yi confronts unbearable grief and claims agency.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

  • Library Journal

    February 1, 2020

    Having outlived three husbands and raised five children, Lilia Liska sits down to read--and finally to annotate with her own distinctive spin on events--the diary of a man with whom she had a brief affair. Meanwhile, she recalls Lucy, the child she lost. From MacArthur fellow Li.

    Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • The New York Times "A portrait of resilience like no other, Must I Go takes Yiyun Li--and the reader--into entirely new emotional territory. Bracing and almost unnervingly perceptive, this is wisdom literature for our time."--Gish Jen, author of The Girl at the Baggage Claim

    "I've always found the openness, the near shapelessness of Li's work to be part of its beauty. Her characters are never coerced; they are patiently observed, they are allowed to live, allowed to disappoint."
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