Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

by Yiyun Li

Overview

In her first memoir, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li offers a journey of recovery through literature: a letter from a writer to like-minded readers.

“A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.”—Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead

“What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?”

Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living.

Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, a mother, a daughter—and through it all she has been sustained by a profound connection with the writers and books she loves. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Søren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin, Dear Friend is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together.

Interweaving personal experiences with a wide-ranging homage to her most cherished literary influences, Yiyun Li confronts the two most essential questions of her identity: Why write? And why live?

Praise for Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

“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 . . . is nothing short of astonishing.’”—The New York Times Book Review

“An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.”—The Boston Globe

“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399589096
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/21/2017
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Read an Excerpt

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Yiyun Li.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life 3

Amongst People 22

Memory Is a Melodrama from Which No One Is Exempt 51

Two Lives 82

Amongst Characters 106

To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture 137

Either/Or: A Chorus of Miscellany 153

Reading William Trevor 171

Afterword: On Being a Flat Character, and Inventing Alternatives 195

A Partial List of Books 203

Acknowledgments 207

Editorial Reviews

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.

It is devastating to read Li write about the inability to find strength, reassurance, or even much sense in holding her child's hand. And it's all the worse because Li doesn't aim to devastate you. Her book contains no symphonically memoir-ish threadings of past and present agonies; it harbors no studious efforts to find poignancy in the clinical literature, as so many recent memoirs of loss and depression do. Li writes that she finds melodrama suspect, evidence of our selective memories striving to put the best face on things. So Dear Friend is Li's attempt to address suicide and depression absent such rhetorical support beams. What's left? A remarkable — if very hard to love — memoir of the small comforts of literature and a sizable urge to throw off the baggage of personal history.

This is surprising from Li because the mood — and sometimes the very argument — of Dear Friend contradicts the detail and layers of empathy that mark her fiction. Across two story collections and a pair of novels, she's mastered a sensitivity to the interweaving of past and present, individual and community, that she often denies in this book. Her 2009 novel, The Vagrants, was a study of the long reach of the execution of a Chinese villager during the Cultural Revolution, but she'd never visited the town in which it was set while she wrote it; visiting later, she feels no particular impact. Her fans admire a scene in her story "Kindness" about a girl who attempts to return hatched chicks to their shells, but Li tells us that the story has no autobiographical basis and sees the need to connect the writer to the work as a kind of affront.

This goes beyond the usual discussions of the authorial fallacy — it's a kind of denial of personhood itself. Li tells us a fair bit about her family and friendships, particularly her friendship with the late Irish story writer William Trevor, an early mentor. But her two hospitalizations are bereft of detail — we don't know what the proximate triggers for them were. She quotes from ER notes that say she felt like a burden to loved ones, but she challenges that assessment: "To say a burden is to grant oneself weight in other people's lives; to call them loved ones is to fake one's ability to love."

Dear Friend is punctuated with grim aphorisms like that. Reading is a virtue because "to read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one's existence." Honesty? "A lie sustains life with absoluteness that truth fails to offer." Memory? "There is no reason to pass on my memories, which I have been guarding all these years, to my children." Suicide? "I distrust judgments . . . on suicides. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings." Later, she writes of suicide that "a sensible goal is to avoid it" — hardly a thundering condemnation. Dear Friend takes its title from a letter by the novelist Katherine Mansfield, and you can see why Li admired the line so much. It contains a recognition of the urge to connect, through writing if nothing else, while also acknowledging a nearly unbridgeable chasm between two different lives.

Li is aware that the way she frames her life as a reader and a person is unusual — she reports on the brickbats she's received for refusing to have her work translated into her native Chinese, and acknowledges that she is sometimes marked as "coldhearted and selfish." She knows, too, that this loose assemblage of thoughts about mortality, identity, and literature (Mansfield and Trevor but also Stefan Zweig, Nabokov, Hardy, Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, and more) is disordered. "Coherence and consistency are not what I've been striving for," she writes. Lacking or denying the familiar comforts of identity and autobiography plainly had consequences for Li. But Dear Friend isn't a defense of the virtues of that absence so much as a first attempt at exploring what a life might be like without relying on them so heavily. If that does seem coldhearted, the flipside is that the very same attitude that made her a writer: She abandoned a promising career as an immunologist to pursue fiction, in part by neglecting all of those narratives about destiny and appropriate professional trajectories.

"I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me," she writes — an elevating aphorism if there ever was one. And yet, how much of a clean break can anyone, even Li, make from those scripts? She writes about how she destroyed most of her journals and letters before she left China for America and then adds, parenthetically: "What I could not bring myself to destroy I sealed up and have never opened." That line is almost as disarming as the one about holding her child's hand and feeling nothing. Literature is full of departures and disconnection — a hero goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town. Li's book proffers an extreme vision of that emotional separation, but it's not one that most readers will find unrecognizable. We're all on that journey; it's just that Li is traveling light.

Mark Athitakis is a writer, editor, critic, and blogger who’s spent more than a dozen years in journalism. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Sun- Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Washington City Paper, and many other publications. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviewer: Mark Athitakis

The Barnes & Noble Review

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

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

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile