Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Douban
Yiyun Li
résumé
Written in the grip of suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is an uplifting account of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li interweaves personal experiences of her childhood in China and her adulthood forging a new life in America with meditations on the many writers she admires - from William Trevor to Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf to Ivan Turgenev. And with quiet integrity, she confirms the fundamental questions that define an author - why write? And why live?
contents
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life......3
Amongst People......22
Memory Is a Melodrama from Which No One is Exempt......51
Two Lives......82
Amongst Characters......106
To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture......137
Either/Or: A Chorus of Miscellany......153
Reading William Trevor......171
Afterword: On Being a Flat Character, and Inventing Alternatives......195
A Partial List of Books......203
Acknowledgments......207
