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  • Published: 23 March 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241978672
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

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





A luminous memoir about reading, writing and how to find meaning in a life

'What a long way it is from one life to another. Yet why write if not for that distance?'

Written over two years while the author battled depression, in and out of hospital, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery through literature.

From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes that have preoccupied these writers and herself: time and transformation, presence and absence, the impulse to abandon life and the impulse to carry on. Drawing on personal experiences - her unstable mother, her time in the Chinese army - she constructs a beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to choose life.

  • Published: 23 March 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241978672
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

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

A remarkable account of literary life [from] an important and gifted writer... Her new book is a meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life

Marilynne Robinson

Extraordinary. A storyteller of the first order

Junot Diaz

A work of arresting revelations...A writer of meticulous reasoning, probing sensitivity, candor, and poise, Li parses mental states with psychological and philosophical precision in a beautifully measured and structured style born of both her scientific and literary backgrounds.

Booklist

Beautiful and profound... This book is a terribly beautiful gift to the reader

Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman

Exceptional... one of our major novelists

Salman Rushdie

Li celebrates the authors who make reading a joyous pursuit, and the details that've made her own life worth living.

Huffington Post

Publisher's description. A luminous memoir from the award-winning author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is the record of a life lived with books and a richly affirming examination of what makes any life worth living.

Penguin

Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life's insoluble mysteries... [she] is the real deal

Michel Faber
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