This weekend, I attended Yiyun Li and Miriam Toews’s inspiring conversation at The New Yorker Festival. The talk made me laugh—and also cry. There were moments I had to hold back sobs. This was also my experience of reading both Li’s and Toews’s work: moved so deeply and in so many different directions.
The evening got me thinking a lot about community. Li and Toews have both lost two family members to suicide and have written extensively about the experience. It turns out that they had never met in person before last night, and yet they had been reading each other’s work. Li explained that, while she knew what it meant to be a parent of a child who died of suicide, she did not know what it is like to lose a sibling to suicide. Thinking of her son who lost his brother, she turned to Toews to better understand. Toews mentioned needing Li’s books; she described looking for clues as to how to live from them.
Alexandra Schwartz, the moderator of the evening (and an excellent moderator at that), summed it up so beautifully: “You both have kept each other company without knowing it.”
This was the sentence that most struck me from the evening. And it speaks to the power of writing. Toews’s latest book, A Truce That Is Not Peace, asks the question, “Why do I write?” A question so many of us have asked ourselves. Why do any of us do anything, really? This idea of “keeping each other company” is both simple and profound. In the silence, across the miles, we keep each other company.
Indeed, I myself read All My Puny Sorrows in a grief-stricken weekend, so worried about someone I care about who was deeply depressed. I read it to understand not just how my loved one felt, but also to understand how I felt. I read it to not be alone. Likewise, I turned to Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow and Wednesday’s Child when someone I love started having suicidal thoughts. I don’t think it was for comfort exactly. I think it was to better comprehend something that is incomprehensible, to go as deep into that place as I could. These two writers have kept me company without knowing it. Our souls sat in a kind of room together. 
I went to the event with a friend who has also had experience with a loved one with suicidal ideation. She said to me after, “It’s so helpful to have a friend who engages with this writing… It helps me to try to understand something that is fundamentally so foreign.” Although we were strangers, all of us seated in that dark theater were in this community of deep thought, all striving to get at something, together.
For those who couldn’t make it, I will share some other vivid moments. Forgive me that I scribbled notes in that dark theater and there might be some gaps in my quotes. It was hard to keep up!
Flinchable: Li mentioned that there are a number of words she doesn’t like to be used to describe her work: fearless, vulnerable, bleak, unflinching. Li called “vulnerable” a “critical cliché.” Toews commented that “fearless” is a word that cannot be true. She’s right; of course, we all have fears! Li explained, “You have to be flinchable … That’s being human. We flinch all the time.” To which Toews replied, “flinching as we go.” I love this new word, flinchable, that Li has coined for us! Yes, we are all flinching through this life. It is normal and even desirable to flinch. Li also mentioned that she does not like the word “grief,” which suggests that it is somehow a process that will end. She will live with her children’s deaths for the rest of her life. It will not be over. “Our dead are not our burdens. It’s not a burden,” she explains. Likewise, her work is not “bleak.” “If you present the world as it is, there’s nothing bleak about it.”
Well, try: Another moment that struck me was when Li, in describing how people in China reacted to her son’s death, said, “Don’t ever underestimate people’s malice.” She explained that she’s fascinated by people’s malice. But also that “There is power in saying, ‘I don’t want to be a part of that community.’” Toews also discussed the conservative members of her father’s community who view suicide as a sin. She explained that her father was never closer to God than when he was on the tracks in the moments before his death. There is a certain defiance about Li and Toews and their work that speaks to me. Schwartz mentioned that people often say, “I can’t imagine living through what you have,” to which she said Toews has replied, “Well, try.” Schwartz calls it a “moral imperative.” Yes, we must try to understand each other. We cannot shrink away from trying—not just on this topic of suicide, but on so many other difficult topics. Perhaps if we tried, there would not be this malice that cannot be underestimated.
On rereading and learning: Yiyun Li is a rereader, something I must confess I do not do enough. She explains that the beauty of rereading is that you notice things you missed the first time. She says that it’s always good to learn new things. After her son died, she learned to swim. “You are going to have to keep living after the death, so you have to keep learning.” This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently myself, as I took a contemporary art class at Sotheby’s this fall, the first class I’ve taken in years, on a subject that I know nothing about. I found the experience incredibly reinvigorating during an otherwise difficult and sad time. It gave me purpose. My classmates seemed joyful about the experience too. I made a friend in the class, and we hope to see an exhibit together someday soon. I wonder if this is a goal we should all give to ourselves during these terrible political times: to constantly learn something new and to do it with others. Maybe the moral imperative is to never stop engaging with topics we know nothing about, putting ourselves into unfamiliar waters over and over. Trying. This might be one way to answer the question why do we live?
Partial failure: Finally, while I didn’t scribble down her exact words, Toews said something that I think will be a comfort to all writers and, indeed to anyone striving to achieve any task: writing is always a partial failure. If the great Miriam Toews can call her own work a partial failure and be at peace with this, then we can too. It is okay to be a partial failure! Go forth and fail and flinch, my friends!
After the event, on my walk to the subway, I challenged myself to try to see something new or interesting in every block, blocks I’d walked so many times before. It dawned on me that we can find something notable on every single stretch of New York City—and indeed in any city or town. Everywhere all the time. There is something important to be seen. I took a picture of a clock I’d surely passed before but only just noticed for the first time. Maybe you will undertake this exercise with me too.
On the subway home, there was a tiny dachshund sitting on the lap of a woman near me. The dog was very calm until a baby on the other side of the car began to shriek. The dog lifted its head and searched for the source of the noise. Every time the baby cried, the dachshund flinched. It became more and more anxious.
It was hard not to think about the community I was in on that car. The man beside me struck up a conversation with the man across from him about his shoes. They were two strangers sharing the common bond of both wearing black sneakers. They complimented each other on these sneakers, on how clean they kept them. They talked about shoe prices and discussed the contents of the Carhartt bag one was carrying. “I’m a union guy and Carhartt gives us a discount, but you have to go to the store.” I thought of my father who wears a Carhartt jacket to work in his yard. I thought of Miriam Toews’s father and wondered what jacket he might have worn to work.
A man with two small boys boarded the train. Brothers. I stood to give the children my seat. These thin boys with enormous eyes looked up at me, a woman in an N95 mask, with complete fear. Could they really take this old woman’s seat? They looked at their dad, who said with his eyes, “No, you cannot take this woman’s seat.” The car jolted forward and they lost their balance. I insisted, I was getting off at the next stop. The man beside me with the clean, black sneakers and tattoos on his fingers also got up so the father could sit with his boys. Here we were, keeping one another company on a rattly subway car, on a cool, fall night. I watched the boys and their father seated beside each other through the window on the platform as the train carried on without me. I looked down at the train tracks, at how close to God we all are.
(Note: If you’d like to read more about Miriam Toews, I interviewed her for the The Rumpus when she published Women Talking.)
