Fictional Girlhood as Life Writing: Happiness, Hoax, and Autobiographical Displacement in Yiyun Li’s <i>The Book of Goose</i>

This article reads Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose as a novel that uses a wholly fictional girlhood to do the work of life writing. The novel is not a memoir, nor should Agnès or Fabienne be treated as surrogates for Li. Its power lies in the form fiction gives Li for returning to questions that have shaped both her relationship to reality and her later writing. These questions include motherhood, grief, and the unstable ethics of writing with or for the dead. Drawing on Life Writing studies, girlhood studies, and affect theory, this article argues that The Book of Goose turns girlhood into a relational and displaced mode of autobiographical thinking. Agnès and Fabienne’s literary hoax reveals that public authorship is manufactured through adult institutions. The article further situates the novel beside Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Where Reasons End, and Things in Nature Merely Grow to show how Li’s fiction responds to reality without converting reality into confession. In The Book of Goose, fictional invention becomes a way to approach what cannot be adequately claimed as autobiography: a divided self, a borrowed language, and a life written through another life.