‘Our Precarious Selves': Suicide and Autoimmunity in Yiyun Li

What does mourning feel like? How does one sense and make sense of grief? How can one register the specific permutations and ramifications of sorrow, anguish, and suffering, of “anger, pity, unforgivingness, even condemnation” (Li, 2018a, p. 51) in the case of a suicide? What are the dimensions and effects of such grief, what are its qualities? And then, on the other hand, we must surely ask the other set of questions: What does it feel like to want to die, to kill yourself, or to do so? How do those feelings and that logic work? The Chinese American writer and former immunological researcher Yiyun Li directly addresses both series of questions in two recent books—her memoir from 2017, 'Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life', and her most recent novel, 'Where Reasons End', from 2019. She does so, I will suggest, by configuring suicide and suicidality, as well as the repercussions of the act, within the terms of a certain autoimmunity.