play | list

The Rant

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. &ldquo;A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.&rdquo;&mdash;Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead &ldquo;What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?&rdquo; 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&mdash;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 S&oslash;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? Praise for Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life &ldquo;Li has stared in the face of much that is beautiful and ugly and treacherous and illuminating&mdash;and from her experience she has produced a nourishing exploration of the will to live willfully.&rdquo;&mdash;The Washington Post &ldquo;Li&rsquo;s transformation into a writer . . . is nothing short of astonishing.&rsquo;&rdquo;&mdash;The New York Times Book Review &ldquo;An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.&rdquo;&mdash;The Boston Globe &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&mdash;Financial Times &ldquo;Every writer is a reader first, and&#160;Dear Friend&#160;is Li&rsquo;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.&rdquo;&mdash;Entertainment Weekly &ldquo;Yiyun Li&rsquo;s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original.&rdquo;&mdash;San Francisco Chronicle

The Rant

The Bengsons

Recent comments

Shannon McLean

Shannon McLean