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.