Description

Yiyun Li emigrated in 1996 from China to the University of Iowa to pursue a graduate degree in immunology.  After dropping out of her PhD program, she earned an M.F.A. from acclaimed Writers’ Workshop; in 2010, she won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship as a “fiction writer”; and in 2017 she became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, directing the Program in Creative Writing.  (Her personal life is quite another story, alas for her.)  She writes in her second language, English.  This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Fabienne and Agnès, 13-year old best friends in 1950s rural France.  As children, they write stories together. As an adult in the USA, when Agnès learns that Fabienne has died, she reexamines their shared younger years and her very different life that their childhood approach to life enabled.  Please read the book so you can participate in our structured, facilitated Zoom discussion.