The author’s prize-winning memoir about losing both her sons to suicide is a calm, sensitive account of ‘radical acceptance’
‘T
here is no good way to say this.” This is the phrase used by police when visiting the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li – twice. On the first occasion, officers advise her and her husband to sit down before telling them their son, Vincent, has died by suicide. The couple hear the same line several years later when James, their other son, dies – also by suicide. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” Li states.
In this memoir, Li describes how Vincent, 16, enjoyed baking, while 19-year-old James was a brilliant linguist and a deep thinker. Shortly before Vincent’s death, Li had written a memoir about her depressive episodes which led to her own suicide attempts. She wonders if this contributed to both her sons’ sense that suicide could be a viable way out of difficulty.
All of this is contemplated in a blunt and stoic manner free of anger and regret. Li reveals how she and her husband have adopted a “radical acceptance”, which means living with the facts of their lives as they are now, however difficult.
