A literary writer from China, Yiyun Li (Kinder Than Solitude) is known for her brilliant English-language prose, and her fiction has won her many awards and a MacArthur Fellowship. Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life contains subtle, densely packed essays inspired by a two-year period of suicidal depression and hospitalizations.
Li's devotion to English turns out to be partly the result of her well-founded desire to flee her past. "My private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody's concern, is that I disowned my native language." Li, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1996, explores her struggles with her inescapable self, her emotional alienation, her sense of time and of emptiness, and "the past I cannot trust because it could be tainted by my memory." She has tried hard to avoid autobiography in her fiction. The idea has horrified her: "Anyone reading one's words is able to take something from one. Had I been more disciplined I would have written nothing, and lost nothing." But here she builds a different bridge between herself and her readers that she has not attempted before. She writes about her Beijing childhood, her difficult mother, lost friends, career path, illnesses and most of all her favorite writers over the years, and her silent conversations with their writings. Readers who understand depression, and who have made books into friends as an alternative way of connecting with other people and with the world, may find a thoughtful new companion in these pages. --Sara Catterall