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

October 24, 2016
The vexed intersection between writing and living (or not living) is explored in these ruminative essays. Novelist Li (Kinder Than Solitude) explores tenuous subjects—ruptures in time, the difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, the pleasures of melodrama—in meandering pieces that wander through personal reminiscences and literary meditations. Braided in are fragmented recollections from her youth in China, including a stint in the People’s Liberation Army; her migration to America to become an immunologist, a career she abandoned to write fiction; stays in mental hospitals; travels as a literary celebrity to meet other literati; and intricate appreciations of writers, including Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. The book can be lugubrious; Li repeatedly visits the theme of suicide—including her own morbid impulses—and is given to gray, fretful melancholia (“There is an emptiness in me.... What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of the emptiness?”). Much of the text is given over to belletristic why-we-write head scratchers such as “this tireless drive to write must have something to do with what cannot be told.” But the wispy philosophizing is redeemed by Li’s brilliance at rendering her lived experience in novelistic scenes of limpid prose and subtly moving emotion.

Despite her best efforts, the youthfully vibrant quality of Jennifer Ikeda's narration is not an ideal match for this mature and complex material. In her powerfully intimate first work of nonfiction, Chinese-American author Yiyun Li reveals the difficulties of living with suicidal depressive tendencies and, in particular, her strong conviction that the struggles she and others face are more a matter of coping with oppressive feelings than of will. During her two hospitalizations, she found solace in the letters and journals of writers--including Katherine Mansfield, Ivan Turgenev, and Marianne Moore--and her thoughts on the writing life will be illuminating to serious listeners. Ikeda's lilting vocal inflections and musical tonality suggest a degree of cheer that is not evident in this contemplative work. M.J. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine