How Death Becomes Imaginable: Yiyun Li, Suicide Affordance, and the Limits of Literary Mourning

I. Not Causation, but Lowered Protection Suicide prevention has a language for contagion . It does not yet have an adequate language for what makes suicide imaginable before any specific crisis arrives. We know how to speak about exposure: the death of a peer, the public narration of a celebrity suicide, the danger of method, glamour, imitation, and clustering. We are less able to name the quieter…