Shared Unshareability, Suicidality, and the Melodrama of Living on after Failure in Yiyun Li

Abstract

Abstract:This essay addresses an aspect of failure that I call "shared unshareability," which brings us to a reckoning that—despite failure being an experience that can be commonly shared—there is always something of failure that never leaves the personal. Articulating failure's shared unshareability can thus help us understand why some of us cannot dissociate ourselves from our sense of failure. I elucidate failure's shared unshareability through a selection of Yiyun Li's texts that deal with the failure to want to live, and further show how melodrama and writing are implicated.