Read 'Techniques and Idiosyncracies' by Yiyun Li, published in The New Yorker on March 9, 2025. The narrator of this story 51-year-old Lilian, is also the protagonist of the author's previous story 'The Particles of Order'. That story saw the deaths of her two sons Oscar and Fenton, and her trying to come to terms with that.
In this story, Lilian went to her usual Dr Fenton for her annual check-up. She had upped his fees since the early days. Lilian stayed with her and the clinic since she didn't want to go through the trouble of looking for a new physician. And she didn't want to explain any other things in her medical files to anyone.
The author had chosen to set the story in a doctor's office because,
A doctor’s office is a petri-dish setting of a peculiar human interaction, but perhaps many relationships between strangers or partial strangers have this undercurrent of disturbance—for instance, later in the story, Lilian remembers being momentarily held as a psychological hostage by a limousine driver. It’s a setting where one is quite alone, while another person’s presence both accentuates and threatens that aloneness.
However, instead of the previous nurse Eileen, a new nurse is at the doctor's office and is in charge of administering the basic auditory tests and blood draws. So there's this awkward interaction with Tina since she had to spend quite a fair bit of time sitting here to complete the check-up. She didn't seek an understanding of Tina. It was simply a polite sort of interaction that ended with her asking Tina if she had children, to which the latter replied no but with much sadness.
Lilian made a noncommittal sound. She had not minded Eileen’s small talk, because it had required neither feeling nor attention from her. Tina demanded extra exertion from Lilian—it took an effort to look intentionally obtuse. Pretending can be a different form of understanding, or of withholding understanding.
This is pretty much that, a story, the musings of a patient in a doctor's office. Sure, Lilian is a human, a lovely and flawed human like all of us. We know her story because she has chosen to speak of it in here, but we don't know all of it. She doesn't say all of it either. It isn't necessary in such a setting. We're only privy to Lilian's thoughts because we're reading her story and she has chosen to share this much with readers, but not the other stuff.
If you want to know more about her dead sons Oscar and Jude, then you'd have to read her previous story. Now, does it matter how much we get to know a person then? That's the underlying thought.
In an interview with the same magazine, the author explained that she wanted to explore the space and distance between humans, and chose to highlight an interaction between 51-year-old Lilian and new nurse Tina (also aged between fifty to sixty), and how the narrator felt.
There’s a new nurse, a woman named Tina. In seemingly minor ways, Tina makes the interaction between patient and nurse seem more charged than it would usually be. Do you want the reader to question whether that’s intentional on Tina’s part or completely by happenstance?
Yes, I would like the reader to question the intention, or lack of intention, behind Tina’s behavior because Lilian, trapped in a situation she can neither define nor articulate, feels uncertain. I suppose fiction is often about the effect a character has on other characters. Some characters, like Tina, make other characters sense something unusual and simultaneously doubt their interpretations—such characters often bring an interesting air of disquiet to a story.
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