THE LOVERS, THE DREAMERS, AND ME: AN INTERVIEW WITH LITERARY BFFsS EDMUND WHITE AND YIYUN LI

Note: this conversation has been edited for length.

CONTENT: mention of suicide

Edmund White can be considered one of the godfathers of the queer literary mafia. Present at the Stonewall Inn when the legendary riots began in 1969, his epic career began with the novel Forgetting Elena (1973) as well as co-authoring the original Joy of Gay Sex (1977). “Prolific” may be an understatement given the number of books he has written over the years in addition to essays for various publications. And to bring it around full-circle for a new generation, his seminal Boys Own Story was recently adapted into a graphic novel by his husband, fellow writer Michael Carroll.

White met Yiyun Li, another prolific author, in 2016. Just as his work has been considered rebellious for being so unabashedly queer, Li herself has also been described as subversive, often writing about outsiders and complicated relationships in novels like The Book of Goose and stories like “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.” From their first interaction, they felt the spark of connection and kinship that transcends the stereotypical Will & Grace portrayals of friendship between gay men and straight women (although they seem to share just as many laughs between them as the characters from the sitcom—a literary Jack and Karen, of sorts.)

I met Edmund through our husbands. In gay six-degrees-of-separation, his husband Michael had dated my husband Jim many years ago and had remained friends. (Michael even wrote the introduction to my husband’s posthumously published book, House Fire.) And in a Hollywood six-degrees-of-separation, the film adaptation of one of Yiyun’s first stories, The Princess of Nebraska (directed by Wayne Wang), was the first feature film I ever appeared in.

Their close friendship has been mentioned before in various publications, but usually in passing or in conjunction with a new book one of them was promoting at the time. In the spirit of Fruitslice, I wanted to delve beyond their literary work and to talk to them solely about their connection and what keeps them together—their platonic love for each other. On a recent rainy weekday I was able to crash their daily 5:00pm book club (which they started during the pandemic and have continued ever since) to ask them a few questions, and watched their banter fly.

Jason Wayne Wong (JWW): I know that the two of you have talked about your daily book club meetings a lot, but it's often framed around a book that either one of you is publicizing. For this conversation I just wanted to focus on your friendship, which I find so incredibly interesting, and just have you talk about each other and your friendship and to see where that could possibly go.

Edmund White (EW):I was planning to retire (from teaching at Princeton), and we were looking around for somebody to…not replace me because I'm (irreplaceable)…

Yiyun Li (YL): You are irreplaceable! [Laughing] Just (someone) to sit in your office.

EW: Anyway, I suggested to our leader that we take…I didn't know Yiyun, but I admired your work. And so then what, they contacted you or something?

YL: They arranged for me to travel to Princeton. And then someone said, “Well, Edmund is here, can you come here and talk to Edmund?” So I came over and we sat down. We fell in love, really love (at first sight.) We just talked for an hour about books!

EW: About books, yeah.

JWW: And this all happened at Princeton?

YL: Yes.

EW: In what was then my office, now hers.

YL: I can't replace Edmund. I'm sitting in his office (now.) Someone offered me a bigger office once someone else moved away. “Do you want a bigger office?” I said no! Because I wanted this office. Because this office used to be Edmund’s.

EW: It's right next to the coffee machine! [Laughs]

YL: That's right! [Laughs] That was 2016.

EW: And then Yiyun had a son who killed himself, and we became very close at that moment.

YL: I think so, yeah…

EW: Well, I don't know…Maybe because your son was gay or would have been gay if he'd been…

YL: He had come out. He came out when he was 13.

EW: He died when he was 16.

YL: I think you texted me and said, “Come over. Come to the city one day, I'll hold you, and we'll cry together for a day.” And I just thought it was the most lovely thing anyone had said to me.

EW: You never know how to react when somebody has an extreme tragedy in their life. You always think, Oh, am I being impertinent or silly or whatever? But I don't know, I just felt like that was the right way to go.

YL: We just became very close friends since then, I think.

JWW: I love how it developed and how you mentioned it was love at first sight, because that falls in line with the theme of this issue on platonic love.

YL: Oh, yeah. We're very much in love! [Laughs]

EW: We always blow kisses to each other. [Laughs]

YL: We always text each other. We even have names for each other. We have our nicknames for each other. [Laughs]

EW: She's Ernestine.

YL: Eglantine! [Laughs] And you're Rupert.

EW: [Laughs] We like them because they're kind of Victorian names.

YL: Yeah. But Edmund and I, we just…we are very good at giggling together. We're not very serious.

EW: Like, we read all these wonderful books, but we don't really discuss them as to what their meaning might be in terms of social impact or something like that. Because we're both writers, we tend to admire the writing, and every once in a while (think), Oh, I wish I could write like that.

YL: I think that's our perennial sentence—"I wish I could write like that.”

JWW: So it's a shared envy that keeps you together!

YL: Shared envy, yeah! And also I think Edmund and I would say we are on the same wavelengths, don't you think?

EW: We like all these English ladies of the ‘20s and ‘30s, but with a rare exception of Kim, which was (written by Rudyard) Kipling

YL: Kipling, yeah…

EW: Everybody hates that book…people who have never read it hate it because he was supposed to have been an imperialist and a British imperialist and all that. But actually this book is so adorable and endearing. It's about a little boy who's an orphan and who's Irish, but who's gone native. I mean, he dresses like an Indian and he can speak several of their languages in India. And he meets this old Buddhist monk who wants to see all the places where the Buddha lived. And so the boy decides to become his guide, and it's full of adventures. But it's such a wonderfully rich book about India. In fact, I've had quite a few Indians say to me it's the best book about India.

YL: Right. And then the Buddhist monk, the old monk and the boy, they were really in love, too, right?

EW: They were.

YL: But not romantic love. They do love each other so much. It's so touching, that book!

EW: It's very touching. Some books, you feel all the portraits are kind of acid-like or acidic, and then some are very sweet. And this is a sweet one.

YL: Yeah

JWW: You two definitely sound like kindred spirits and I’m wondering, do you ever notice any similarities in—if not your work—any similarities in your lives in terms of Ed being a gay man or Yiyun being an Asian woman? If you can somehow relate to each other and perhaps some commonalities. I mean, that’s kind of how I relate to both of you (being both gay and Asian.)

YL: Writers are always outsiders, right? We're always outsiders. But I don't think it's that outsider-ness that brings Edmund and me together. It's more about…I don't know. I think it’s chemistry, right? It's just like love. You cannot explain it, but we just feel comfortable with each other, and we giggle all the time. We're so irreverent!

EW: There's always one part of our session which is about gossip.

YL: Oh god, he's a very good gossip! [Laughs]

EW: But it's not mean gossip! It's just chuckling about people.

YL: For me, one thing is Edmund has such a good memory of all the books he reads. Right, Edmund? And he is such a knowledgeable person. It's just like we have endless things to talk about because Edmund knows the world. I don't know the world as much as Edmund does, but we just talk about the world.]

EW: Like she just wrote this book about these two girls...

YL: It's called The Book of Goose..

EW: And she asked me what would be a good book to read about rural life in France in the past.

YL: And he told me to read Georges Bernanos, which was the right person for me to read while working on it. So usually I (would) always have a question for Edmund—whether it's about France or French or just about something, you just can trust he knows the answer…

So you haven't heard, Jason, but my dog is very jealous of Edmund! Anytime I talk to Edmund, I think he recognizes the changing of my voice and he starts to chew his bed. He has eaten at least five beds because of Edmund! And I have all these pictures—he's chewing on the bed while I was talking to Edmund. [Laughs]

EW: [Laughing] Does Phillip get jealous when you talk to your friends?

JWW: (My cat) Phillip doesn't get jealous. He just gets concerned when I raise my voice above a whisper.

YL: Oh!

JWW: He‘s very sensitive. So when I raise my voice at all, whether it‘s for an audition or something that I‘m taping he just gets very upset, like, “What‘s going on? What‘s happening?!“

So besides the gossip and giggling, what else draws you together?

EW: We underline our favorite passages in the books that we're reading. We don't read them very fast. We read about 20 pages a day. And then the thing that's so weird is that we always underline the same passages, which shows that we have very similar taste, I think. In writing, at least.

YL: Yeah…and then we pretend. Every time we underline the same passage, we pretend to be surprised! “Oh, my God. My God, I did this, too!” [Laughs] We make each other laugh all the time.

EW: [Laughs] Right.

JWW: What is it about this long history of friendships between gay men and straight women?

YL: Oh! That's a very interesting question.

EW: Yeah

YL: [To Edmund] What do you think?

EW: I don‘t know...

YL: I mean, I would say this is coming from a straight woman, right? I would say there's a little bit less of a boundary between a gay man and a straight woman. You just feel less…You know what I mean?

EW: I‘m not going to seduce you.

YL: And I‘m not doing anything not faithful to my husband because I'm giggling with Edmund.

EW: Maybe there are things more important than your sexual orientation. I think we're like…well, the French say “sister souls,” but that sounds a little gay. [Laughter] “Âme-soeur.”

YL: I was a scientist before. And in molecular biology, there's something called an enhancer. It's part of the gene that's called the enhancer. I always liked that term, “enhancer,” because I feel Edmund and I are enhancers of each other's lives, right? We don't do things to each other. We don't torture each other. We don't make each other (sad). We just enhance our lives.

JWW: That's a lovely way of putting it. Enhancers.

YL: Really. I'm sure you have a lot of friends, Jason. And I have friends, and not all friends are enhancers of lives. Some friends are more demanding, right?

EW: My oldest friend…he's very bristly…and you're always tiptoeing around him, whereas I don't feel that way with (Yiyun.) I feel it'd be hard to offend her.

YL: So I do think this is a very special friendship, even among my friends. I mean, this is really just a pure enhancer friendship.

JWW: I really like that term. You two enhance each other. And I think that's the point of this issue’s theme and showing this platonic love connection that the two of you obviously have. I know that a lot of friendships can wax and wane over time. The ones that are sometimes more demanding are the ones who sometimes fall out of favor over the years or over time…]

EW: Or let's say, you know somebody through a lover, and then you get rid of that lover and it's kind of awkward with the friend because the friend has to choose...and anyway, all that stuff. The politics of everyday life. But we don't worry about that.

JWW: How do you two maintain the friendship? Just chatting every day?

YL: Just every day at 5:00, but then sometimes I come in to see Edmund..

EW: Yeah, she and brings me delicious food.

YL: Yeah. I used to go to a hair salon like a block from Edmund’s apartment. The reason I used to go there (now they’re closed) was that every eight weeks I would come in to have my hair done and then we would have lunch together. I do still come into the city often, and every time I go in, I will just stop by at Edmund's place..

EW: Which is great. I find our friendship very reassuring, too, because especially during the pandemic…it was nice to have a friend that you could rely on who you knew was going to be soothing and reinforcing.

YL: Yeah. I think we've got a pure love for each other. I just feel like there's not anything demanding in this friendship.

EW: That’s right.

YL: We're just ourselves with each other, you know?

EW: Right. Well, because I'm not expecting you to leave me a million dollars or to give me that rare edition of Ezra Pound or whatever. [Laughs]

YL: [Laughing] Right!

JWW: I think both of you basically answered my last question. But I was going to ask, because you both seem to embody it, and everything you just said seems to reinforce this…What does platonic love mean to each of you?

EW: I think when you're younger, you have these very intense friendships, and then when you get older, it gets very lonely because people die, or they drift away. And during the pandemic, so many people left New York. And so, this friendship came in just at the right time.

YL: Just the right time, I know. I mean, for me, I think it's just the expectation that we are together every day at 5:00. We're together. We're laughing. It's a very consistent factor in my life for the past several years. It's very consistent, and I like that, too. I think we love each other, right?

EW: Yeah! [Laughs]

YL: [Laughs] Oh, Edmund is so sweet. My son is a college freshman. Before he came home for the winter break, Edmund said he read something. He read parenting advice on how to welcome your child home from freshman year. Edmund said to me, “You don't want to give him too much pressure. You just give him good food, let him do whatever he wants.” So sweet, that he would read up parenting advice and tell me! [Laughs]

EW: [Laughs] Maybe a little arrogant of me…

YL: But everybody loved it! Everybody thought it was very sweet of him.

EW: Some people hate me and think I have a heart of ice and everything, but as you can see, with each other we're not icy.

YL: We're not! And we're very affectionate. And the first time (I met) Edmund he was so affectionate—he also wrote an apology…he wrote a note of apology to me! He said, “I think it's my WASP background…Maybe I wasn't warm enough when you were here..?” He's the most affectionate person. He apologized for not being warm enough! [Laughs] It's just very lovely, you know?

JWW: So many people in the LGBTQ+ community rely on our chosen families. And it's just so touching and sweet to see you two have become family.

YL: Thank you.

EW: It’s true! I'm probably like an uncle or something.

YL: I know, it's very nice! He's very nice to my child.

JWW: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

EW: Well, I'm very thrilled seeing Yiyun’s career just take off. I mean, she wins all the prizes everywhere and everybody is discovering her. That's a wonderful feeling to see a close friend whose work is being recognized.

YL: Thank you! I think we have a very special friendship. Also, I think a lot of people are a little bit envious of my friendship with Edmund—including my dog! [Laughs] I do think it's special, and if I talk to anyone about my friendship with Edmund, everybody recognizes the quality, or the essence of that. But I also feel that not everyone—at least among my group of friends—not everyone has that kind of friendship. So, I think it's just something very special that people all recognize. And if I talk about Edmund with any friends, they just like to listen.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Yiyun’s son James, mentioned above, died while at Princeton several weeks after this interview took place.

If you or someone you know may have suicidal thoughts, you can call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat online at 988lifeline.org. We care about you.

Love, FruitSlice xo.