Very depressing. I felt disoriented and even though the writing was beautiful and insightful, I couldn't make much headway through the book.

Written during a two year period when she was hospitalized for suicidality, “Dear Friend” is a deeply personal record of Yiyun Li’s reflections on whether, and if so why, it is worth staying alive. “These essays were started with mixed feelings and contradictory motives,” Li writes. “I wanted to argue against suicide as much as for it, which is to say I wanted to keep the option of suicide and I wanted it to be forever taken away from me.” Part memoir, part essay, part literary criticism, Li — a voracious and attentive reader — approaches this question by turning to her favorite writers for insight. She writes of her life, and of how it takes shape in conversation with the words of writers including William Trevor, Ivan Turgenev, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, John McGahern, Li Po, Søren Kierkegaard, and others.

Of course, to speak of the circumstances and manner of writing is not to speak of the book itself. This is the first of Li’s works that I have read. I am totally in awe of Li as a stylist. Li’s prose leans forward off the page, brimming and alert. Her prose is direct, lucid, penetrating, confident, self-aware rather than self-conscious, judicious, sharply observant. My copy of this book is streaked with yellow highlighter tracing perfect sentences and whole paragraphs that are simply luminous.

As is easy to imagine, many parts of this book make for tough reading. I would not recommend this book to anyone who isn’t in a place to matter-of-factly consider reflections on suicide, or who isn’t in a place to be in close proximity to / accompaniment of someone considering it. There felt, to me, to be a foundational paradox in the text: it is both an account of sensing an emptiness to life and a testament to the overflowing fullness of life as seen, captured, and complicated by literature. Li acknowledges both of these ends. Amazingly, she writes about mental health hardship with not simply a refusal of shame, but with a fundamental dismissal of it. It does not figure in her reflections, which, to me, was an immensely refreshing, level, and rare approach compared to literature I have so far encountered in the realm of mental health. What I mean to say is: there is no defensiveness here, no attempt to justify. Only an earnest engagement with what is felt, and what is true to those feelings, and what paths forward might stem from those feelings where they are. I am deeply moved by the seriousness with which Li takes reading, and what her fellow writers have to say to her through time. This is an intense and wandering book, deeply respectful, uncommonly intimate, and frustratingly unresolved.

Ultimately, this book does not offer readers easy or clear answers. How could we expect it to? That was never the project or the purpose of these writings that Li has chosen to share with us. I am having trouble evaluating this book but expect it to sit with me for some time. How strange: I don’t think that I would recommend it to others, yet I am excited to read more of Li’s writing, and I’m glad that I read it. It is a singular reading experience.

The first essay itself would have made this a 4.5. Absolutely socked me. Surprisingly dense. I found I couldn't concentrate in the presence of my family.

I really appreciated the approach Ms Li took and her honesty, but I had a hard time getting through this book. I think it's because I didn't know any of the references she was making. There were passages that were powerful, but I struggled to latch onto a narrative to bring myself in. The urge for isolation was very relatable.

Sincere

This is a book that is not for everyone. Li writes of her life, the choices she's made, for example why she chose to leave medicine and start writing. There are also harder subjects, such as suicide, her mental health, and the criticism she's faced as a writer for her refusal to write in Chinese or have her work translated in Chinese.

I had never heard of this author before reading this book, so a lot of her words didn't touch me as they would if I were a dedicated reader of her work. This is partially the reason for my rating. The other reason is that she writes of literature she's read, literature that has influenced her. The fact that I wasn't familiar with some of these writers again, meant that I couldn't appreciate this book as much as I'd have liked.

Aside from all that, I did like that Li refused to write in that autobiographical, chronological, prose that has become so common. She adapts a more casual, conversational, tone as though she is, like all of us, still figuring things out. She still has questions. And lessons she wishes to share such as, perhaps the most crucial, don't make quick judgements without understanding.

I did like this book for the issues Yiyun Li raises and for her willingness to share her reasons for writing, publicly. It's a difficult choice to make, that of abandoning one career for one that is nothing short of uncertain. I admire her courage and, I do plan to read her other work.

I received this book through NetGalley.

It’s difficult to review and rate this book. On the one hand, it’s impeccably, beautifully written, and full of insight. On the other, I personally found it so quietly heavy and fatalistic that I couldn’t read more than a few pages every day. Much like the prose, the person we encounter in these essays is so lovely that it can make her attempts at self-effacement all the more overwhelming.

Yes, from the outset it’s a book that deals with suicide, depression, hospitalizations, and family trauma (among other things). But the way Li writes sinks it all into your heart like a stone that you have to cary around with you for the rest of the day—she’s such a good writer, in fact, that at some points she's able change my mood, I feel the dark cloud of the apparent truth Li meditates on continually: nothing matters. An example of something I underlined that made me have to put down the book for the day:

“For years Tolstoy ended his journal each day with three letters, initials for the Russian ‘if I live.’ Every month he began with the note 'nearer to death.’ How did I forget to start my journal with the reminder that nothing matters? ... Is writing not my way of rehearsing death?” Somewhere else in the book she describes such a pure moment: her young son putting his hand in hers in a moment of casual tenderness. She describes looking at their hands—examining the gesture—and “understanding” it but not experiencing it in any meaningful way. Moments like this, not showy but utterly honest in a way that nudges at certain dark corners we might be too scared to examine in such a sustained way, built into quite an onslaught.

The one bright solace in this book is that, unlike perhaps writing (see above), reading is Li’s great passion and joy. She is wonderful to sit and think with as a reader. The moments where she’s talking about books or authors she admires feel like a balm—like hope, or sustenance, or meaning in the muck. It’s very much a memoir of reading as well.