ISBN: 0399589104 9780399589102

Category: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs

Page count: 224

<b>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.</b><br><br> <b>“A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.”—Marilynne Robinson, author of <i>Gilead</i></b><br><br><i>“What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?”</i><br><br>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, <i>Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life </i>is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living.<br><br> 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, <i>Dear Friend </i>is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together.<br><br> 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?<br><br><b>Praise for <i>Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life</i></b><br><br> “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.”<b>—<i>The</i></b><i> <b>Washington Post</b></i><br><br> “Li’s transformation into a writer . . . is nothing short of astonishing.’”<b>—<i>The</i></b><i> <b>New York Times Book Review</b></i><br><br>“An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.”<b><i>—The Boston Globe</i></b><br><br> “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.”<b>—<i>Financial Times</i></b><br><br> “Every writer is a reader first, and <i>Dear Friend</i> 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.”<b>—<i>Entertainment Weekly</i></b><br><br> “Yiyun Li’s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original.”<b>—<i>San Francisco Chronicle</i></b>