After losing her sons, Yiyun Li learned to ‘suffer better’

Terry Gross (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. The words grief or the grieving process are not words writer Yiyun Li chooses to describe her own feelings. To her, those words make it sound that at some point, you emerge from grief. She prefers to use the word abyss, which is where she expects to be for the remainder of her life. That doesn't mean she's incapable of laughter or even joy, but she expects to return to that abyss. Her teenage sons both died by suicide six years apart. Vincent at age 16 in 2017, and James at age 19 in 2024

She wrote an eloquent memoir about that published last year titled, Things in Nature Merely Grow. It won a Pulitzer Prize. That's among the many honors she's received for her fiction and non-fiction, including the Penn Faulkner Award, the Penn Hemingway Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship popularly known as the Genius Grant. Her new novel, Music Against the Night, is set in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It's about two music prodigies, Adelaide, who's known as Pesheret, and John. He wants to be the next Mozart and become rich and famous. She wants to find her place in the music world and be recognized for her talent, in spite of how music is a place largely for men. Women can be wives, muses, or mistresses.

John and Adelaide are brought together by music, and drawn apart because of their musical aspirations. Yiyun Li grew up in China, served a year in the Chinese military, came to America to study immunology, and left her PhD program to become a writer. She's a professor in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

I want to let you know in advance that our interview will include a discussion about suicide. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, or you're facing mental health struggles, you can call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. That's 988

Yiyun Li, welcome to Fresh Air. And before we start the interview, I just want to say I'm really sorry about your son's...

Yiyun Li (2:12)

Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Terry Gross (2:16)

Of all the novels you could have written after your older son's death and your younger son's death, why did you write this one?

What was it you needed? My impression is you wanted to get out of the now and go to another time and another place. The story in this new novel, it's set in Paris, in India, in Russia, not in the US, not even in this century.

Yiyun Li (2:48)

Yes.

Well, I would say I started a novel, and I was in the middle of the novel when James died. But you're right, this is a novel far from my usual interests or concerns. And the reason I think I went back to history is I would like to live again through history, through historical figures, and through my characters living in the late 18th and early 19th century. Some of the concerns, confusions, and just thoughts and feelings I have experienced in my life, and other people have experienced in their lives. So you're right, I'm going away from this now. But I'm making the past into a new now for myself and possibly for my readers.

Terry Gross (3:48)

I have to say, there's so much death surrounding everybody in the story because of the era that it's set in. I mean, death is eternal.

There's no century that doesn't experience death.

But it's especially, it's like very common in this period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There's a lot of death by childbirth. Adelaide's mother dies in childbirth. There's infant death. There's fevers for which there was no medication. There's war. There's the guillotine and the characters have friends who are killed by the guillotine in Paris. Did you consciously want to go back to a time when death was something very common?

Yiyun Li (4:35)

Well, I didn't go back as decision to explore death then.

I think I was more curious about the characters. But as you pointed out, back then, death was prevalent. You know, illness, childbirth, childhood illness and revolutions in several countries and wars across the globe, the different wars. So death was a subject one could not avoid writing about the time.

Terry Gross (5:09)

Are these characters based on real people?

Yiyun Li (5:11)

Yes. So John Feud was an Irish virtuoso who spent most of his adult life in Russia.

He invented the nocturn form, which was taken over by Chopin, and Chopin made that form popular. But John Feud was the first one to write nocturns, and he was considered the grandfather of Russian music. And Adelaide was his wife and again, a historical figure, but we did not know much about her.