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

Description

A luminous memoir about reading, writing and how to find meaning in a life 'What a long way it is from one life to another. Yet why write if not for that distance?' Written over two years while the author battled depression, in and out of hospital, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery through literature. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes that have preoccupied these writers and herself- time and transformation, presence and absence, the impulse to abandon life and the impulse to carry on. Drawing on personal experiences - her unstable mother, her time in the Chinese army - she constructs a beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to choose life.

Yiyun Li is the author of three novels, Where Reasons End, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short-story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was listed among Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists 2007. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize and a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Reveals, gloriously, the companionship, intimacy, and insight that can come from obsession with the written word * LA Review of Books * Literature, the clash of public and private, 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 Weaving sharp literary criticism with a perceptive narrative about her life as an immigrant in America * The Millions * An intimate memoir of darkest despair... A potent journey of depression that effectively testifies to unbearable pain and the consolation of literature * Kirkus * Quietly forceful, unrelenting... She unfolds an argument with the self, suspicious of the very concept , but not, ultimately, refuse its possibilities -- Eula Biss Novelistic scenes, limpid prose, subtly moving emotion... Personal reminiscences literary meditations... Li explores ruptures in time, the difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, the pleasures of melodrama * Publisher's Weekly * Publisher's description. A luminous memoir from the award-winning author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is the record of a life lived with books and a richly affirming examination of what makes any life worth living. * Penguin * Beautiful and profound... This book is a terribly beautiful gift to the reader -- Neel Mukherjee * New Statesman * A remarkable account of literary life [from] an important and gifted writer... Her new book is a meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life -- Marilynne Robinson Extraordinary. A storyteller of the first order -- Junot Diaz Exceptional... one of our major novelists -- Salman Rushdie Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life's insoluble mysteries... [she] is the real deal -- Michel Faber A work of arresting revelations...A writer of meticulous reasoning, probing sensitivity, candor, and poise, 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 * Li celebrates the authors who make reading a joyous pursuit, and the details that've made her own life worth living. * Huffington Post *