...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 ... Though billed as a consolation for 'like-minded readers,' the book does not neatly fall within such a narrow definition. As with Li’s fiction, her struggle to admit life over death is at times traumatic to read, all the more so because there is a barely concealed agony in the scrupulousness of its measured words ... Plangent and precise, this is Li’s personal anatomy of melancholy.

Li’s transformation into a writer — and her striking success (she is the winner of a MacArthur 'genius' grant, among other prestigious awards) — is nothing short of astonishing. But most of the essays here tend to center on the personal unraveling that accompanied this metamorphosis: two hospitalizations following suicide attempts and time spent at a recovery program ... Li can be an elusive writer, and her meditation on the teleology of pain and memory sometimes reads like a series of aphoristic koans...The reader never doubts that Li is an incisive thinker, but her tendency to sublimate her own emotions in the correspondence between others, be it Turgenev to Henry James or Chekhov to Tchaikovsky, occasionally puts one in mind of a devout nun’s scrupulous study of her prayer book ... The most memorable essay in the collection is not the most personal one but rather recounts Li’s relationship to English, which she calls her 'private language.'”

There is a lot of loss in this book, most notably the loss of one’s life by one’s own hands. How does one come to terms with a strong urge to commit suicide? How does one make sense of this urge when outwardly one is 'an example of the American dream come true?' How does a writer partake in a genuine conversation with a world that loves the sight and sound of success stories — the splendor without the abyss beneath? ... Li’s ruminations on her anguish are so poignant that it’s nearly impossible not to close your eyes and give her a long mind-hug when she says 'again and again my mind breaks at the same spot as though it is a fracture that never fully heals' ... Interspersing her thoughts with stories from her Beijing childhood and her time in the army, Li doesn’t allow us too far behind the scenes of her private life, and I salute that ironclad hold on writerly privacy. Still, from what she tells us about her mother — the 'family despot'— I was left disturbed and wishing she would tell us more explicitly about the link, if there is any, between her mother’s invectives and Li’s eventual melancholia ... 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.

Every writer is a reader first, and Dear Friend is Li’s haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her—from the flowery Chinese verse of her youth to the brilliant parade of poets, novelists, and Danish existentialists who helped see her through multiple hospitalizations for depression. (The heart wants what it wants; sometimes all it can stand is Kierkegaard.) Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound.

She does not attempt to follow the plot of her life – which is as dramatic as any of her invented characters' lives – as much as she allows herself to drift from memory to memory, letting her thoughts extend like far reaching spokes that span both literary references and personal memories ... For all of her logical twists and spiraling narratives, it is hard not to think like Li after reading her book. There is a magical property to her voice, one to absorb and admire in its absolution. I found myself, Li-like, sewing images of my own past to the passages and authors I respected, sustained by the personal language and private history I had created over time. Li had accomplished what she had set out to do: She had reached me.

...exquisite new collection of essays ... an arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression ... She renders all of this in language as pristine as sun-bleached bone, yet there is a pulse to it and not the faintest hint of the lurid.

Yiyun Li’s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original. Read the essays gathered in Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life and you’ll be left with the sense that they’re the product of a singular mind, one that has no time for cliches or pandering ... there’s a distinctly dark tenor to her work. You might say that this book is haunted, although she probably wouldn’t put it that way ... Li is at her most interesting when discussing her profession and her relationship with English. It has become her 'private language,' one that molds her ideas and compels her to write with uncommon precision ... There are moments when Li strives for profundity and ends up with puzzling results...Li hits the mark more often than not, though, and she finishes strong.

A remarkable — if very hard to love — memoir of the small comforts of literature and a sizable urge to throw off the baggage of personal history ... But Dear Friend isn’t a defense of the virtues of that absence so much as a first attempt at exploring what a life might be like without relying on them so heavily. If that does seem coldhearted, the flipside is that the very same attitude that made her a writer: She abandoned a promising career as an immunologist to pursue fiction, in part by neglecting all of those narratives about destiny and appropriate professional trajectories ... Literature is full of departures and disconnection — a hero goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town. Li’s book proffers an extreme vision of that emotional separation, but it’s not one that most readers will find unrecognizable. We’re all on that journey; it’s just that Li is traveling light.

Though the structure of Dear Friend is nonlinear, there are recurring preoccupations — fatalism, melodrama — that influence Li’s actions and unify the text ... A reluctant memoirist, Li’s halting prose reflects both her discomfort with the form and her trepidation about revealing too much ... Notwithstanding her own discomfort, Li has created Dear Friend from the messy intersection of reader and writer, where she has always lived. The result, though hard to classify — neither straight-ahead memoir nor straightforward literary criticism — amounts to a deeply sad story, one that nonetheless reveals, gloriously, the companionship, intimacy, and insight that can come from obsession with the written word.

Li writes elliptically about her first forays into fiction, her fraught relationships with her family, her years spent in China, and the aspects of American culture that stood out to her upon immigrating. The stylistic choice is a good one; it matches her experience of depression, which also hit her in fits. It’s reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s essays, which proceed as thoughts might, making thematic connections while hopping around in time and space ... Li’s writing unfolds slowly, like a story shared between good friends. That seems to be the point: She writes to connect with her readers on the deepest emotional level. And she succeeds.