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

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

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.

â€œA meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.â€â€”Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead

â€œWhat a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?â€

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 daughterâ€”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 SÃ¸ren 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?

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

â€œIn this exquisite, intimate, lyrical memoir, Yiyun Li reveals her life in flashes appended to an arrestingly coherent philosophy of time, self, and place. Uniting the discipline of a scientist with the empathy of a novelist, she scatters profound and often difficult truths through these generous, wise, challenging pages.â€â€”Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

â€œYiyun Li has written a remarkable account of her literary life, begun in her youth in China with the books that first engaged her in the great conversations of literature. In her own emergence as an important and gifted writer in English she has brought a new voice to that great world. She has also been, in the deepest sense, sustained by it. Her new book is a meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.â€â€”Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead

â€œLiterature, national identity versus the individual self, the clash of public and private, the mysterious nature of relationship, indeed, human nature itselfâ€”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.â€â€”Mary Gaitskill, author of The Mare

â€œThis extraordinary book is the story of a writer being made and making herself. It is the story of depression coming in waves and being beaten back through love and stubbornness. And also it is one of our finest writers scrutinizing the books that have mattered most to her.â€â€”AkhilÂ Sharma, author of Family Life

â€œReading Yiyun Li feels like being inside a mindâ€”a quietly forceful, unrelenting mind. Within the limits of language, which she all but touches, she unfolds an argument with the self. She is suspicious of the very concept of the self, but she does not, ultimately, refuse its possibilities. â€˜What a long way it is from one life to another,â€™ she writes, while closing that space.â€â€”Eula Biss, author of On Immunity
Country USA
Brand Random House Books for Young Readers
Manufacturer Random House
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 9780399589096
ReleaseDate 2017-02-21
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9780399589096

Country	USA
Brand	Random House Books for Young Readers
Manufacturer	Random House
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	9780399589096
ReleaseDate	2017-02-21
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9780399589096

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

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