BOOK REVIEW: Must I Go: A Novel by Yiyun Li

Must I Go: A Novel by Yiyun Li fits partly into the mold of a crotchety elderly woman (in an assisted-living facility) telling her life story. The unusual aspect of the story is that she chooses to do this not because of the memoir-writing class that is inspiring others in the facility, but because she has located a published (abridged) diary of an old lover, and feels the need to append it.

The first part of the book is set-up. The protagonist, Lilia, has been married and widowed three times and has a passel of children from her first husband. But just before she met him, she met the lover, Roland, and they had a one-night stand. She was sixteen years old, beautiful, and saw him as an exciting man of the world. (He seemed to see her as available and disposable.) They met again when she tracked him down in a hotel in the city and had sex again. At the same visit to the city, she met her first husband. She was already pregnant with Roland’s baby.

It’s possible her memories of Roland would have faded over time, if not for the daughter they shared that he was never aware of. But what truly made him unforgettable was that the daughter, Lucy, killed herself in her early twenties. Lilia can’t think of Roland without thinking about Lucy or vice versa. 

At any rate, Roland always wanted to be a novelist, and Lilia kept an eye out for his novel. He never wrote one, but his diary was published posthumously and she found that. She relives her life in the reliving of his, learns a good deal about him, and decides that even though Lucy never knew her biological father, it was important that Lucy’s daughter and granddaughter know of him. So she as she read the diary, she pasted notes into it that were both clarifying and questioning.

This is an interesting premise and structure. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an interesting story. Roland had been a larger-than-life figure in Lilia’s head until she read the diary and discovered (if she didn’t, the reader certainly does) that he is a dull man, who wavered between imagining himself fascinating and bemoaning his own dullness. Lilia’s personal claim to fame is her ability to repress all her emotions. Repression may serve her well enough, since losing a child to suicide is an unfathomable tragedy, but it doesn’t serve the narrative of the story. We end up with two not very likeable protagonists, perseverating over the disappointments and suffering of their lives in an increasingly monotonous way. There are some lovely insights and turns of phrase, but these weren’t enough to sustain my interest in the book.