Yiyun Li on her sons’ deaths by suicide: ‘You can carry on being an alcoholic or you can carry on writing’

Yiyun Li appears on my computer screen from her home in Princeton, New Jersey. There is a beautiful old fireplace behind her, artwork above, and in the far background, what looks like an exercise ball.

“I’m very happy,” she says. “Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize.”

It’s 8am where Li is, 1pm in Ireland. The Nobel winner was announced the morning we speak. I suggest Li might have been in the running, but she shrugs it off.

“No. I’m a baby writer!”

The 53-year-old “baby writer” is nevertheless a much-admired figure by readers and her writer peers. Among her celebrated works are the short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and Wednesday’s Child; and the novels Kinder Than Solitude; Where Reasons End; and The Book of Goose. Her latest novel, Music Against the Night, is the first in a trilogy centred on the life of Irish Romantic composer John Field, and French pianist Adelaide Percheron, with whom he had an unhappy marriage in Moscow.

A familiar figure to many Irish people (at least those who have frequented the National Concert Hall, where there is a room named after him), the man who invented the nocturne is less well known internationally – he is remembered as a footnote in Chopin’s biography, if he is remembered at all. Li first came across him through Tolstoy.

“I always say I met John Field in Tolstoy’s autobiography,” she says. “He had a passage about listening to his mother playing, on the pianoforte, John Field’s composition. He went on to say Field was Mama’s master ... I started to do research, and I found him fascinating – the trajectory of his life and also that he no longer remains a well-known figure, even though he was influential.”

A slim biography from the 1970s gave some insight into Field’s life, though it was relatively scant in detail. Adelaide appeared only in a few short paragraphs, as an orphan who started life in Pondicherry, India, and wanted to be a pianist.

“It was just: by the way, he had this wife, he didn’t love her. They separated.”

I am curious about prodigyhood. Because prodigy is always a myth. The myth is made by people

Even Field’s life was loosely sketched, with more of a focus on music and scores. But Li says novelists “always get attached to things that are mysteries to us”.

“It’s always good when there are things unknown to us. I think I liked to make sense of these two characters, how they travelled so far, and how they carved a life in Moscow.”

She read work by contemporaries of John and Adelaide – a French female actor’s memoir about travelling from France to Russia, for example, and a French man’s memoir about living through the 1812 fire of Moscow. For the sections set in Ireland, she approached author and Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, who was teaching in Princeton at the time. He gave her a reading list to familiarise her with Dublin of the late 1700s.

Naturally enough for the first in a trilogy, Music Against the Night focuses on the early lives of John and Adelaide. The structure is a kind of musical counterpoint – two separate lives speaking to one another across time and space.

The figure of the prodigy is important. Field, the son of a violinist and grandson of an organist, is musically talented but, like Mozart before him, his success is also calculated and cultivated.

“I am curious about prodigyhood,” says Li. “Because prodigy is always a myth. The myth is made by people.”

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There is also a neat counterpoint in the book between music as a utilitarian, profit-making endeavour and music as a higher force. At one point we encounter the composer Czerny writing and publishing compositions he has never played or heard.

“I’m not driven by anything – profit, of course, but not anything ineffable,” he says, to the astonished Field. “You seem to equate music with life itself.”

“No, no, no!” retorts Field. “I don’t equate them. I place music above life.”

I wonder does Li feel the same way about her own art.

“Ah, that’s a good question. Do I place my writing above life? No, I actually don’t think that’s the case. I am interested in life. I’m curious about a lot of things. I don’t usually make my art so glorious or mythical ... In the novel, [the composer] Clementi says even God cannot make perfect music. And I think art is the same way. It’s limited. Art falls short.”

Li, who was born in Beijing in 1972, was raised a maths prodigy. It was not until she moved to the United States in her twenties that writing entered the fold, and even then it was only by chance. In 1996 she arrived at the University of Iowa to study Immunology, only to discover the place was a writing mecca (among the graduates of its famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop are Flannery O’Connor, John Irving and Ann Patchett). She couldn’t help but catch the bug, taking up writing first in a bid to improve her English, but by 2005, she had a master of fine arts degree in creative nonfiction and fiction, and had already begun placing stories in The Paris Review, The New Yorker and elsewhere.

Thirty years on from that first move, Li still lives in the United States, and has always written in her second language of English. (Her relationship with China is complicated, she says. Until recently, she did not allow her works to be translated into Chinese.)

If you carry on, you can carry on being an alcoholic, or lying in bed screaming all day, or you can carry on gardening and playing music and writing

—  Li on the suicide of her two sons

“Writing in a second language is an important part of my work because I always say a word has to be [used] only after I have thought about it thoroughly,” she says. “There’s that intimacy between a native speaker and the language, but I don’t have that intimacy with English. English is entirely acquired. So, I use dictionaries often, and look up the etymologies of words, so that I can have a better understanding of every single word I use.”

Li’s literary sensibilities were shaped by Russian writers – during her upbringing, Russian translations were among the few works of foreign literature not banned in China. But later, when she began to study creative writing, she found herself equally influenced by Irish writers.

“I always say I learned writing by reading William Trevor,” she says. (The Cork-born author would later become an important friend to Li.) “But also, other Irish writers – John McGahern, for instance. I’ve probably read every single word by him.” (Li writes the foreword to a recent Faber reissue of McGahern’s Memoir.) “And Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, this older generation. And of course, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and the younger generation. I suppose there is something in my nature that feels attracted to Irish literature.”

Li has been to Ireland many times and will pay a brief visit later this month for an event with Anne Enright. She hopes to see the Field Room in the National Concert Hall, but can’t stay long, as she has to dash back to the United States for the Pulitzer Prize presentation. She was announced a winner earlier this year, for her 2025 book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir for her son James, who died by suicide in 2024. Her son Vincent also died by suicide in 2017. Li describes herself as living in “an abyss”. She has no desire or capacity to escape this abyss, only to endure it.

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“I saw someone this weekend – an acquaintance – I haven’t seen her since James’s death, and she said, ‘How are you doing?’ Then she said, ‘That’s such a bad question.’ ‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the only question you can ask. How are you doing?’ I said, ‘Now listen, I have only two options. One is to drop dead, the other is to carry on.’ ... I seem to have chosen to carry on. I then think, if you carry on, you can carry on being an alcoholic, or lying in bed screaming all day, or you can carry on gardening and playing music and writing.”

Li was halfway through writing Music Against the Night when James died. After, she carried on.

“I think this novel, or, at least, working on it, sustained me and has sustained me since then.”

The work of Anne Carson, most notably her translation of four plays by Euripides, Grief Lessons, is also something Li cites as an important force in her life and experience of loss. She does not know Carson personally, but “love[s] her words from afar”.

And then there is music. When embarking on the project of Music Against the Night, Li took up piano lessons. (She jokes that she approached her teacher, a professional pianist who doesn’t take on hobbyist adult students, with a “book proposal”). Two days after James’s death, she arrived, as usual, for her lesson.

“People always ask that question: how could you do this? Even my piano teacher said: how could you do this? Or sometimes people would say: I would not be able to do it if I were you. Which is a very funny comment, because they are not me, right? They were not in my shoes. They would never know what I feel at that moment.”

The decision, for Li, was logical.

“I could certainly just cancel the piano lesson, say I’m not up to it, which is understandable, but then I still have an hour that I have to face, in what I call this abyss. [So] I might as well just go to the piano lesson. My piano teacher and I were so sad we couldn’t talk to each other. She just sat there and said: ‘I don’t know what to say, let’s just do the drills.’ I learned a lesson that when we cannot say anything, we might as well just move our body ... To move the body and to use your brain are good ways to endure something tremendous.”

Music Against the Night is published by 4^th Estate. Yiyun Li will be in conversation with Anne Enright on Wednesday, October 28^th in Dublin’s Unitarian Church, hosted by Dubray Books. Tickets available on Eventbrite

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