MUST I GO

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.