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

"Those who have read Yiyun Li’s fiction can recognize her tone anywhere: calm, but not soothing; matter-of-fact, yet dreamlike; a voice dedicated to seeing the world clearly and without sentimentality. Dear Friend is Li’s unusual memoir, written during a two-year period of hospitalization for suicidal ideations, meandering through memory with the same elegant chilliness that belongs to any of her invented stories. And for all of her logical twists and spiraling narratives, when we realize that Dear Friend is a treatise on the sometimes-Sisyphean task of making life livable, it is difficult not to think like Li."

"Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, by Yiyun Li — the book that's currently breaking my heart."