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

By: Yiyun Li

Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda

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)

©2017 Yiyun Li (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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)

“Delicate as a watercolor...a rumination on literature and [Li’s] long battle with depression.” (O: The Oprah Magazine)

“[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)

tremendous intimate writing from a deep thinker

Her writing forces the reader's introspection. She analyzes her unusual life and then writes about it in way that forces you to do the same with your own decisions and the arc of your life.
Amazing intimacy and ability to bring the reader along in her thoughts and consciousness!