Despite her best efforts, the youthfully vibrant quality of Jennifer Ikeda's narration is not an ideal match for this mature and complex material. In her powerfully intimate first work of nonfiction, Chinese-American author Yiyun Li reveals the difficulties of living with suicidal depressive tendencies and, in particular, her strong conviction that the struggles she and others face are more a matter of coping with oppressive feelings than of will. During her two hospitalizations, she found solace in the letters and journals of writers—including Katherine Mansfield, Ivan Turgenev, and Marianne Moore—and her thoughts on the writing life will be illuminating to serious listeners. Ikeda's lilting vocal inflections and musical tonality suggest a degree of cheer that is not evident in this contemplative work. M.J. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

About midway through her collection of personal essays, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Yiyun Li tells a story. Like nearly every story in the book, it's unadorned and melancholy, its simplicity at once a demonstration of the virtues of narrative economy and a display of emotional distance. But this story is an extreme version of both — I keep coming back to it, and keep feeling chilled by it. Li has been hospitalized twice in a matter of months for fear she will kill herself, we've learned, and now she is sitting on a bench with her young son:

I was aware of his comfort in putting his hand in mine and keeping it there as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It must be, but it occurred to me that I didn't understand it. I could approximate understanding, but it would only be that of an anthropologist.

Reviewer: Mark Athitakis

10/24/2016
The vexed intersection between writing and living (or not living) is explored in these ruminative essays. Novelist Li (Kinder Than Solitude) explores tenuous subjects—ruptures in time, the difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, the pleasures of melodrama—in meandering pieces that wander through personal reminiscences and literary meditations. Braided in are fragmented recollections from her youth in China, including a stint in the People’s Liberation Army; her migration to America to become an immunologist, a career she abandoned to write fiction; stays in mental hospitals; travels as a literary celebrity to meet other literati; and intricate appreciations of writers, including Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. The book can be lugubrious; Li repeatedly visits the theme of suicide—including her own morbid impulses—and is given to gray, fretful melancholia (“There is an emptiness in me.... What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of the emptiness?”). Much of the text is given over to belletristic why-we-write head scratchers such as “this tireless drive to write must have something to do with what cannot be told.” But the wispy philosophizing is redeemed by Li’s brilliance at rendering her lived experience in novelistic scenes of limpid prose and subtly moving emotion. (Feb.)

Li has stared in the face of much that is beautiful and ugly and treacherous and illuminating—and from her experience she has produced a nourishing exploration of the will to live willfully.”—The Washington Post
 
“Li’s transformation into a writer—and her striking success (she is the winner of a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, among other prestigious awards)—is nothing short of astonishing. . . . For someone who says that ‘pain was my private matter’ and considers ‘invisibility’ a ‘luxury,’ writing about these experiences cannot have been easy. . . . Immeasurable loss hovers just behind these pages, but in sacrificing her first tongue, Li tenuously acquires in her adopted one some legible form of ‘self.’ English, Li’s first language in writing, is the only one in which she could have told this story, one in which Li says she feels, finally, ‘invisible but not estranged.’”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Delicate as a watercolor . . . a rumination on literature and [Li’s] long battle with depression.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Li is an exemplary storyteller and this account of her journey back to equilibrium, assisted by her closest companion, literature, is as powerful as any of her award-winning fiction, with the dark fixture of her Beijing past at its centre.”—Financial Times
 
“Every writer is a reader first, and Dear Friend is Li’s haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her. . . . Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Yiyun Li’s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“[Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is] not an empirical study of mental illness, but a collection of very personal observations, a story as poetic and wending as its title. . . . Li’s writing unfolds slowly, like a story shared between good friends. That seems to be the point: She writes to connect with her readers on the deepest emotional level. And she succeeds.”—HuffPost

“A work of arresting revelations . . . A writer of meticulous reasoning, probing sensitivity, candor, and poise, [Yiyun] Li parses mental states with psychological and philosophical precision in a beautifully measured and structured style born of both her scientific and literary backgrounds.”—Booklist
 
“In this exquisite, intimate, lyrical memoir, Yiyun Li reveals her life in flashes appended to an arrestingly coherent philosophy of time, self, and place. Uniting the discipline of a scientist with the empathy of a novelist, she scatters profound and often difficult truths through these generous, wise, challenging pages.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

“Yiyun Li has written a remarkable account of her literary life, begun in her youth in China with the books that first engaged her in the great conversations of literature. In her own emergence as an important and gifted writer in English she has brought a new voice to that great world. She has also been, in the deepest sense, sustained by it. Her new book is a meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.”—Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead

“Literature, national identity versus the individual self, the clash of public and private, the mysterious nature of relationship, indeed, human nature itself—these subjects and more are explored with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid mental beauty. A must-read for anyone trying to stay sane in a world that might be perceived as insane.”—Mary Gaitskill, author of The Mare

“This extraordinary book is the story of a writer being made and making herself. It is the story of depression coming in waves and being beaten back through love and stubbornness. And also it is one of our finest writers scrutinizing the books that have mattered most to her.”—Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life

“Reading Yiyun Li feels like being inside a mind—a quietly forceful, unrelenting mind. Within the limits of language, which she all but touches, she unfolds an argument with the self. She is suspicious of the very concept of the self, but she does not, ultimately, refuse its possibilities. ‘What a long way it is from one life to another,’ she writes, while closing that space.”—Eula Biss, author of On Immunity

09/15/2016
A MacArthur Fellow, New Yorker 20 Under 40, and Granta Best of Young American Novelists, Li (Kinder Than Solitude) offers her first nonfiction, a meditative memoir that chronicles her move from China to America and biologist to writer, while considering the meaning of reading and writing in our lives.

Despite her best efforts, the youthfully vibrant quality of Jennifer Ikeda's narration is not an ideal match for this mature and complex material. In her powerfully intimate first work of nonfiction, Chinese-American author Yiyun Li reveals the difficulties of living with suicidal depressive tendencies and, in particular, her strong conviction that the struggles she and others face are more a matter of coping with oppressive feelings than of will. During her two hospitalizations, she found solace in the letters and journals of writers—including Katherine Mansfield, Ivan Turgenev, and Marianne Moore—and her thoughts on the writing life will be illuminating to serious listeners. Ikeda's lilting vocal inflections and musical tonality suggest a degree of cheer that is not evident in this contemplative work. M.J. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

2016-11-01
A Chinese-American fiction writer offers an intimate memoir of "darkest despair."In her fiction, Li (Creative Writing/Univ. of California, Davis; Kinder than Solitude, 2014, etc.), winner of multiple writing awards and a MacArthur Fellowship, has created bleak worlds inhabited by estranged, psychologically damaged characters who are haunted by their pasts. The author, who grew up in Beijing under an oppressive political regime and with an emotionally volatile, demanding mother, has resisted the idea that her work is autobiographical. "I never set out to write about melancholy and loneliness and despondency," she writes. However, as she reveals in this bravely candid memoir, those emotions have beset her throughout her life, leading to a crisis during two horrifying years when she was twice hospitalized for depression and suicide attempts. Soon after Li came to the University of Iowa "as an aspiring immunologist," she decided to give up science and enroll in the university's famed graduate writing program. She was inspired, not surprisingly, by reading William Trevor, "among the most private writers," whose stories gently evoke the lives of sad, solitary characters. Li's abrupt career change included a decision to write in English, which led some to accuse her of rejecting her Chinese heritage. Others suggested that "in taking up another language one can become someone new. But erasing does not stop with a new language, and that, my friend, is my sorrow and my selfishness." "Over the years my brain has banished Chinese," she writes, in an effort to "be orphaned" from her past. Li frequently invokes writers—Katherine Mansfield, Stefan Zweig, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Hemingway, and Turgenev—who "reflected what I resent in myself: seclusion, self-deception, and above all the need—the neediness—to find shelter from one's uncertain self in other lives." Her title comes from a notebook entry by Mansfield, which Li believes expresses her own reason for writing: to bridge the distance between her life and her reader's. A potent journey of depression that effectively testifies to unbearable pain and the consolation of literature.