In her new autobiography, Li Na says her relationship with her mother suffered for a while after her mother remarried. Li's father passed away when she was 14, and she says she felt betrayed by her mother's remarriage.
“I was obsessed with the notion that she’d betrayed my father and me, and that she was responsible for making a virtual orphan of me,” Li wrote. “Anger is stronger than sorrow, and anger can keep you from collapsing.”
In a book review on SI.com, Courtney Nguyen calls Li’s autobiography “a love story” and says that passages about her husband, Jiang Shan, “are genuinely touching, particularly because we’re so used to seeing her crack dismissive jokes at his expense.”
“I’ve always had a temper like a firecracker,” Li wrote. “If someone sets it off it explodes, and as soon as it does, I’m filled with remorse. With outsiders, I can usually endure all sorts of unpleasant behavior. It’s only with Jiang Shan that I pull this sort of ill-behaved nonsense. From what psychologists say, most people are only bad-tempered with those who make them feel secure, because you know that the person won’t leave you. So losing your temper is in fact a form of dependency.”