I’ve Seen Sunny Days that I Thought Would Never End

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A profile of a writer in today’s NYT really affected me. I mean first I had to get over the fact, as I do every day, that the NYT didn’t profile me when my book(s) came out, but I digress. Yi Miris has written a novel called Tokyo Ueno Station. She made a suicide attempt at 14 and was coaxed off a ledge by a janitor who brought her home and gave her, along with his wife, a meal. “Her depression persisted, and she tried several more times to kill herself.” Those sentences are so easy breezy, as if she sneezed several more times at the opera or tried on a pair of black pearl earrings a few more times before settling on the emerald cut chandeliers. She kept writing, she fell in with some thespians and had a romantic liason with a much older director. At 26 her first novel was published and won a prize for debut novelists. “Since then,” she says, “I have written every day. It’s just how I live. Life itself is writing.” Sometime I do think writing is the opposite of suicide.

Life itself it writing. Discuss.