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    Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
    Unavailable
    Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
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    Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
    Audiobook5 hours

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

    Written by Yiyun Li

    Narrated by Jennifer Ikeda

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    “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?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 5, 2019
    ISBN9781984887344
    Unavailable
    Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
    Author

    Yiyun Li

    Yiyun Li is the author of several 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 the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.

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

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    • 3/5
      A book written “ to argue against suicide as much as for it... which is to say I wanted to keep the option of suicide and I wanted it to be forever taken away from me”.
      This book of scattered memoirs by Yiuin Li is her way of trying to ensure some form of mental hygiene during two years when she struggled with suicide disorder. While writing this collection of essays, she finds a focus: “ an hour taken away from rumination is ab hour gained... writing becomes an effort to detect a warning sign before it appears “.
      Why is she suicidal? Her life in China, struggling with a mother with mental illness, emotionally abusing her child as well as her desire, as an adult, to be a full time scientist, a full time mother and a night shift writer ( thus skipping sleep in a pervasive manner) might be possible explanations. She comes to accept that “ cells signaling works faster and in a less regulated manner than logic”, thus she does not exclude a biological base of her mental unbalance.
      How can one cope with this?
      She is hospitalized and she is medicated, but that is not enough. She tries to find answers in other writers’ memoirs and letters, especially those that opted for suicide or who also struggled with mental health issues.

      “ Suicide is a type if impatience people rarely understand” or “ one never kills himself from knowledge and understanding, but always out of feelings “ are some of her thoughts around the issue.

      There are moments of insight into this book that I really appreciated, but I guess I did not find this book at the right time and the right space in my life. It was exhausting and emotionally draining to go through it and I am happy it finished. I can appreciate how personal this soul searching process is, so it is not just to say that “ I liked this book/ I did not like it”, because this type of phenomenological exploration is what it is. I think it is more of matter of timing and echoing and this is reflected in my rating of this book.