I read New Yorker fiction #1: “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names” by Yiyun Li (10/1/2018)

Summary: A woman works through grief after the death of her teenage son by entering into a spreadsheet the birth and death year of everyone she has known who is no longer alive.

Line that will stick with me: “Memory was a haystack. Search for any one story and you’d get a hundred stories, none of them complete.”

My take: I made it to the end – and wasn’t sorry. Though it has a “plot” line that intrinsically takes the story all over the place, the story was ultimately satisfying due to the engaging nature of the woman’s exploration of her acquaintance with death and grief, the changes in which are recognized by her – and is the point of the actual ending.

(Fair disclosure – my spouse works for a funeral home, which may make me more open to stories about how people deal with grief.  That being said, the reasons I actually liked the story did not depend on this.)

I read New Yorker fiction

I’ve been a voracious reader most of my life, a wannabe fiction writer since grade school.  I’m unapologetically a fan of SFF and mystery/crime fiction – and have been known to categorize a certain sort of story – ultra-literary, barely distinguishable plot and/or character arc, endings that feel like the last paragraph was deleted — as “New Yorker fiction.”

And yet the New Yorker has come into my home every week for years. I try to read the fiction; sometimes it’s quite good, and others it’s, well, New Yorker fiction.  I’ll be trying to read New Yorker fiction – all the way through to the potential non-end– and record my take on it here.