It took me an inordinate amount of time to get through this book, not that I was unwilling to pick it up having laid it aside but because of its density - it is exhausting to read. There are so many thought-provoking observations my copy could have been full of annotations - as is Lilia’s copy of Roland’s memoirs. These memoirs have already been reduced from three volumes to one by Roland’s executor, then Lilia’s narrative edits them again for his granddaughter and great-granddaughter to discover, long after his death, ‘who he really was’. As if that were possible. What is so absorbing about this is how different people’s memories of the same event or person are skewed by their own self-interest. Added to this, there are things Roland didn’t know that Lilia does, making her commentary on him unfair, and things Lilia doesn’t know but would desperately like to, but either Roland didn’t consider them important enough to include or so intimate that those pages have been destroyed. She herself is mentioned in his memoir just a handful of times, galling for her but not unexpected since he cannot know how significant a player they should be in each other’s lives.

A very original structure and it worked exceptionally well for me. Roland and Lilia lay themselves bare with what they say and how they say it. I found them fascinating. Both have moments of wry self-awareness that mean their musings stop short of becoming morbid.

Just a few examples of the writing and the flavour of this novel:

‘A woman’s value, in her opinion, was not measured by the quality of the men in her life, but by the quality of the women in the lives of those men. Lilia, though she appeared only briefly in Roland’s journals, would have made any woman proud.’

‘What happened to Aunt E? There’s not much more to learn from the rest of the book. Roland didn’t forget her. Or else he wouldn’t have kept the entries about her. But he remembered her and he kept her in the diaries because she made him look like an interesting young man. She was an interesting woman. This he forgot.’

‘One must credit the war, which can transform anything into water under the bridge.’

I enjoyed it all very much and would highly recommend.

Thank you to Random House Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC
Roland Bouley, the character at the centre of Must I Go, is the sort of protagonist that Great Writers (ie, white and male) like to write about, and the sort of protagonist who usually instantly turns me off a book. Bouley is a twentieth century writer. He has lived a full, globe-trotting life. He is deeply selfish, and counts a loyal wife (Hetty) alongside a lifelong muse (Sidelle Ogden) and countless other lovers.
Must I Go is not, however, an ordinary narrative about an obnoxious writer who we are somehow expected to root for. The book may revolve around Bouley but our protagonist is 81 year old Californian Lilia Imbody (nee Liska), one of Bouley’s many fleeting love affairs: ‘Lilia Liska from Benicia, California, that’s who I am. Always’. Lilia had borne Bouley a daughter (Lucy) unbeknownst to him, raised by her husband (Gilbert, the first of three). Lucy, who reminded Lilia of Bouley in personality and temperament, committed suicide young (Lilia didn’t cry – ‘crying is not my way. Arguing is’). Lucy in turn left her own daughter Katherine, who also has a daughter (Iola), Lilia’s great-granddaughter. Lilia has a large family, with many siblings in each generation – it is a confident author that assembles such a large cast for what is effectively a first-person epistolary novel.
The narrative conceit of Must I Go is that the bulk of the book consists of the annotations Lilia for Katherine and Iola in an edition of Roland Bouley’s diaries. Lilia features in Bouley’s diaries only in passing (as with other lovers, known only as an initial). On page 154 of Bouley’s diaries she is described as ‘the kind of girl my future wife would disapprove of’. We are being told two lives: Bouley’s by his own hand and with Lilia’s commentary; and Lilia’s own life. In the version I read there was no clear formatting distinction made between Bouley’s entries and Lilia’s annotations (I’m sure this will be made clearer in the physical editions), but such is the clarity of Li’s writing that the voices of Roland and Lilia are immediately distinguishable. Lilia is a fabulous creation – she is spiky, funny, reflective and rather morbid. She is deeply judgemental about the other residents of her home (particularly those engaged in memoir writing classes). There is just the touch of Baby Jane about her. Roland, through his diary entries, is less distinctive – but this is more a function of his selfish character being rather more familiar to us than the much more original, insightful and interesting Lilia.
Lilia is outwardly morbid but her writing about death is touching, thoughtful and original. Yiyun Li has a closer relationship with death than most would wish and has explored it in previous books, and has identified writing fiction as a necessity to engage with her own self. I note that the acknowledgements to Must I Go mention soberly that ‘the writing of this novel was interrupted by life’ – death may well have been at the forefront of her mind, but if so then life and memory were too. I highlighted countless phrases in Must I Go, almost all about memory or death, and almost all uniquely beautiful and original.
The conceit allows Li to play with structure and narrative. Not only do we know that the diaries are heavily edited, but we also know that whole sections were destroyed at Sidelle’s request, and we are only shown the entries Lilia chooses to annotate for Katherine and Iola – notably not including the passages about her. Everything we receive is filtered (or clouded) multiple times. Li even manages to have her cake and eat it – after a slightly meandering section of Bouley’s diaries, Lilia blames Roland for not being able to ‘tell what was important, and what was not’. Lilia is frequently exasperated with him (‘why was he so afraid of being forgotten, when he himself invested so little in remembering others?’) but her annotations are tinged with a romantic nostalgia of a life lived with great character, but also great heartache, and yet no regrets.
At times it feels like a great hall of mirrors filled with dry ice – beautiful but ambiguous and somewhat discombobulating. But, unexpectedly, the narrative punches come at the end of Bouley’s diaries with the deaths of his wife Hetty and muse Sidelle. We realise that we have never really known either woman, we have only read Roland’s selfish unthinking opinions, and Lilia’s ill-informed views. A similar effect happens when we learn that Lilia’s first husband Gilbert, who apparently unknowingly raised Roland’s daughter Lucy as his own, did in fact know of her parentage. We see suddenly that all these characters lived their own rich, full and complex lives – but our narrators are not able to do justice to them. Memory, we are reminded, is not just selective, fragmented and unreliable, but also profoundly subjective – and ultimately transient. We can leave behind a memoir; we can even leave behind annotations of someone else’s memoir; but we can’t leave behind truth. Must I Go is an immensely rewarding read.

This is a complex novel about Lilia studying the diaries of an earlier lover Roland Bouley. As we read the entries in his diary she annotates them as she thinks Roland has lied, exaggerated and changed the sequence of events to make himself seem more important and put him in a better light. Lilia is obsessed with Roland as he is the father of her eldest daughter Lucy although Roland is never told he is the father. Lilia raises the child with her husband Gilbert.

The novel gives the reader a detailed study of how Lilia views her relationships and how she copes with the love and loss in her life.
I found the novel slightly hard to get into but I’m glad I persevered as I found it turned out to be a rewarding and thoughtful novel.