{"id":163161,"date":"2023-02-02T11:10:33","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T16:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=163161"},"modified":"2023-02-02T12:49:07","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T17:49:07","slug":"space-for-misunderstanding-a-conversation-between-a-m-homes-and-yiyun-li","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/02\/02\/space-for-misunderstanding-a-conversation-between-a-m-homes-and-yiyun-li\/","title":{"rendered":"Space for Misunderstanding: A Conversation between A. M. Homes and Yiyun Li"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph of A. M. Homes by Marion Ettlinger. Photograph of Yiyun Li by Basso Cannarsa\/Agence Opale.<\/p><\/div>\n

A few times a year, the writers Yiyun Li and A. M. Homes sit down to lunch. As friends, they often find themselves talking about almost anything but writing. Often, though, as they ask each other questions, something interesting and unexpected happens: \u201cThe thin thread of a story might be unearthed,\u201d Homes recently told us, \u201cor the detail of a recent experience, or a gnawing question one finds unanswerable. Somewhere between the menu, the meal and the coffee, maybe the story begins to form.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Last year, Li and Homes both published new novels. In Li\u2019s <\/em>The Book Of Goose, she tells the story of a complex friendship between Agnes and Fabienne, farm girls, who each have been in some way neglected by their families. Homes\u2019s latest book, <\/em>The Unfolding, is a political satire that explores the fault lines of American politics within a family.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

At the end of the year, the two friends sat down for one of their lunches\u2014and what follows is a bit of what they talked about.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

Funnily enough, as colleagues and friends, one of the things that we never talk about is writing.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

Once in a while I will tell you a story or say something has happened, and you\u2019ll say, \u201cWrite that into a story.\u201d That has happened three times. Particularly with the story \u201cAll Will Be Well<\/a>,\u201d as I explained in an interview<\/a> with The New Yorker<\/em>: \u201cSometimes it needs a nudge from another person. I was talking with my friend A. M. Homes one day, and I told her about this practice in California, where we were asked to send care packages to our children\u2019s preschool with a letter, in case of a catastrophic earthquake. She said, \u2018You have to write a story about that.\u2019 It had not occurred to me until then, and it turned out that there was a place for the care package in a story.\u201d I think you have a specific talent for saying, \u201cWell, that\u2019s an idea.\u201d There\u2019s an expansiveness to the way you look at the world. Do you look through a telescope or a microscope? Where does it come from?<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

I would say my way of looking comes from growing up as an outsider in my own family\u2014a person adopted into a family. I felt other and different and experienced the world as an observer. There\u2019s a space between me and other people that would otherwise perhaps not exist.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

Do you still feel that way?<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

I do. It\u2019s a strange position that has also given me enormous freedom to inhabit others and create characters. I don\u2019t feel wedded to any particular identity because I don\u2019t feel I have an identity.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

I come from a different kind of family, where I often wished that I were adopted. When someone\u2019s scrutinizing you all the time, your instinct can be not<\/em> to look at them, not to think about them. Because I\u2019m sheltering myself from all these things in my own life, I can create an alternative universe where my perspective is.<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like you\u2019re on the outside, and a shade has gone down that says \u201cClosed for the afternoon\u201d and no one can see that you\u2019re inside, looking off in a different direction.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

Yes, and for you, it\u2019s like you\u2019re outside the house and the shade comes down, and you\u2019re thinking, \u201cWhat\u2019s going on inside the house?\u201d<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

Exactly. And wondering: do I even have a key to the house?<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

So, where are you looking at this moment?<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

For better or worse, I\u2019m a very American writer, so I\u2019m looking at the way we consume things. I\u2019m increasingly interested in economics and how a person\u2019s economic life affects their narrative and trajectory. Where and how a person lives, whether they have money or have access to health care, all these things change the course of their life profoundly. I always feel that, in fiction, and certainly when we discuss fiction, we don\u2019t talk about those things enough, but I\u2019m fascinated by their implications.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

I always say that every character has to have a job. Many students create characters who don\u2019t have jobs. They don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Certainly the reason I\u2019m so curious about the concept of the quintessential American writer is because I am not one, although my coming of age as a writer happened in America. So I\u2019m curious about how you define an American writer.<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good question\u2014how does one define an American writer? To be honest, I think that raises another question that until recently I\u2019ve been loath to discuss. That questions is, How does one define an American female writer versus an American male writer? The gender gap with regard to material and expectation and even who reads the books feels larger to me in America than in other countries. In the U.S., men write the Great American Novels\u2014the books about the scale and scope of the American social, political, economic experience\u2014and women are supposed to write the smaller-scale, intimate, domestic stories. In other countries things are not so divided. There is not Women\u2019s Literature, or Chick Lit, and then Men\u2019s Literature. This bothers me a lot, and I would say that my most recent book, The Unfolding<\/em>, is an attempt to do both\u2014to write both the large-scale, state-of-the-nation novel and also unpack the small-scale, intimate life of a family. But almost as soon as the book came out, a bookseller asked me, \u201cWho is this book for?\u201d and I was caught off guard. I didn\u2019t know what she meant. Was she asking is it for men or women? Was she asking is it for people who agree with my point of view? I don\u2019t know\u2014when I am writing I never think about who this book is for\u2014beyond the hope that my fiction is both entertaining, funny, and provokes thought, robust conversation, and debate about the issues of our time. Does that make any sense or say anything about the American novel?<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

One thing I can relate to as an American writer is clarity. I was in a cab in Beijing recently, and the cab driver asked me what I did for a living. I said, \u201cI\u2019m a writer.\u201d This cab driver, who had apparently read many books translated from English, and especially American writers, said, \u201cAmerican writers are very straightforward. In China, we consider writing as making circles. You do all these hide-and-seek games. You never say what you want to say.\u201d He said, \u201cAmerican writers, they say what they want to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a super-interesting idea\u2014depending on what country someone is from, one has more or less freedom to say directly what they want to say or to code their writing in some way so that someone can extrapolate another meaning from it.<\/p>\n

I think there is accuracy to the idea that there is a bluntness to American writing. It aims for an immediate connection with the reader. And it\u2019s almost as though sometimes there\u2019s not a lot of room to build the relationship, because the attention span is so short that either you connect immediately or it\u2019s over. It\u2019s almost like, Swipe right. You escaped that in The Book of Goose<\/em>, which I think of as originating from a more European model.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

The world of my novel is entirely rural. It\u2019s set in the French countryside. My characters are French girls. But they will never place their own lives in a historical setting. They will never say, We are two French girls living in the countryside in poverty post\u2013World War II under American occupation. All these historical terms describing their existence do not matter to them. I felt liberated writing about them because I did not have to worry about all these things that critics would say about rural France, post\u2013World War II, the American occupation. No, this is a world made up by two girls, entirely made up by two girls. I feel that I got a little, like, a shortcut because my characters live in their own world in a way. Would you say that you are the opposite?<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

Yes and no. It\u2019s beautiful the way you described the characters in The Book of Goose<\/em> as living in the world of their imagination and their physical existence and their environment. It\u2019s a world from inside out\u2014and actually I always start from that point, too, the interior of the character\u2014although in The Unfolding<\/em> in particular there is a lot of social, cultural, and political framing and large amounts of history and fact. So it is absolutely both in the mind\u2019s eye of the characters, but as they are participating in the known world in a very obvious sense.<\/p>\n

Another thing we share: We both live in our imaginations and we pull in threads from our worlds and our experiences, but they are not the dominant theme. We are not writing about ourselves.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t find myself that interesting.<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t find myself that interesting either. Like you, I have written about myself at times and about experiences that I\u2019ve had, but fundamentally, it\u2019s not the thing I enjoy most.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

Do you think readers like to go beyond themselves?<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure anymore. When I was growing up, all I was looking for was a way out\u2014a way into another world. So I read biographies. I thought, \u201cJust show me how to be a person. Show me how to live a life.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that, as things have become more fractured, people seem to read to confirm their ideas about themselves and their identities. They\u2019re looking for a mirror. We also are in a moment when misunderstanding is not tolerated. But misunderstanding is fundamental to growth because you cannot assume everyone will understand everything, nor can you assume that they will agree. So you have to have a zone where you can navigate that. I\u2019ve always found that reading and writing books helped me to do that.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

Where is the zone now? Where is that space? How do we make that space? I did an event with Garth Greenwell, and he mentioned\u2014and it\u2019s true\u2014that people always say my work is too bleak. I said, \u201cThe bleakest thing is when life is bleak and you pretend it\u2019s very rosy.\u201d I\u2019m in the William Trevor camp of writers. John Banville described Trevor and said, \u201cWilliam Trevor arrives in a beautiful town, and he looks around and says, \u2018How beautiful is this town? Let me write and find out what\u2019s wrong with it.\u2019\u201d My belief is that there\u2019s something innately unsettling and troubling underneath. I want to write to find that layer rather than cover that layer up.<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

I\u2019m curious about your relationship to secrets. Are secrets helpful? Do you think of yourself as secretive?<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

I want to make a distinction between secretive and private. John McGahern famously said that Irish people don\u2019t have privacy, only secrets. It\u2019s a lie that you live your entire life inside the church, inside society.<\/p>\n

Even with no secrets, you can always hold something in your heart. So I feel that at this moment I\u2019m not secretive but I have my privacy. How about you? I think you are more outgoing, more out there.<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have secrets anymore. I think it comes from the fact that I\u2019m actually painfully shy. When I was younger, people sometimes misread that as my being formal or off-putting, and so I worked to show that I\u2019m not scary. But now it\u2019s like I\u2019m naked, I have no covering, no shell, which is another problem. I definitely don\u2019t have any secrets. I also don\u2019t feel like I have a lot of privacy.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

What about your characters? All characters have secrets, but they don\u2019t seem to have privacy because of the way we look at them. How do you think about that?<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

I would say my characters in my most recent book have so many secrets that I don\u2019t even begin to know how deep they go, and they are also pretty private. In the book before this one, I was writing this character, Harold Silver, who\u2019s a Nixon scholar, and I found him very difficult. I kept asking myself, \u201cWhy is it so hard to write this?\u201d Slowly, I came to understand that I didn\u2019t know Harold Silver because Harold does not know himself. And only as Harold came to know himself did the book become easier to write.<\/p>\n

I have a craft question for you. When I read your work, it feels to me so well-crafted and so fine-tuned, and each line is really perfect and beautiful. I wonder, do they come out that way? Or what is your revision process like?<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

No, of course nothing comes out perfect, right? With this new book, The Book of Goose<\/em>, the first draft was one hundred fifty pages longer than the final. Secondly, there was an unnecessary frame, a bit like the one in Lolita<\/em>. I was very attached to that frame, but everybody, all my early readers, indicated that it was not going to work.<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

But you needed it to write it.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

I think that frame was for my psychological comfort. I argued, I defended the frame, and eventually my editor said, \u201cI think you want the book to be a different one than the book is meant to be.\u201d And when she said that, I thought, \u201cOh, that makes sense.\u201d So I cut away the frame. I rewrote the second half. How many drafts did you do of your recent book?<\/p>\n

HOMES<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting is that each book defines its own terms. With The Unfolding<\/em>, the complexity was in figuring out the weave of the stories. I didn\u2019t want each person\u2019s story to repeat itself or each character to have to expound upon the same experience. So it was a question of how to keep it moving forward without accounting for each character in every moment.<\/p>\n

Grace Paley used to say to me that the bummer about being a writer is that you\u2019re never promoted to senior vice president of writing. Every time you are thrown back to the beginning. You might acquire some skills for the management of problems, but each book is so different, and you have a different agenda because you\u2019re not trying to just repeat yourself. So you have to discover what the terms are of that book and how it will operate and the ways in which it has weaknesses.<\/p>\n

LI<\/p>\n

Totally. That\u2019s an argument I constantly have with how books are read\u2014they\u2019re read as products. Books are not products. A book cannot be perfect. Nothing is proportional. Nothing is perfect. Some of Mavis Gallant\u2019s books, for instance, are just so good and terrible at the same time, and all I can say is that she gave birth to a baby that looks different from all the babies in the world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A. M. Homes is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including <\/em>The Unfolding;<\/em> May We Be Forgiven,<\/em> which won the Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction; and the bestselling memoir <\/em>The Mistress\u2019s Daughter. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation, and is active on the boards of numerous arts organizations. She teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yiyun\u00a0Li\u00a0is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels\u00a0<\/em>The Book of Goose and<\/em>\u00a0Where Reasons End. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Windham-Campbell Prize, a PEN\/Jean Stein Award, and a PEN\/Malamud Award, among other honors. She teaches at Princeton University.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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