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A review by vjy
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
3.0
2.5/5, 3 if giving full stars
TW: suicide
I don't think this rating encompasses entirely how I feel about this book - I'm not sure it's so much a fault with the book or the writing, but my understanding of it. Li writes very lyrically, abstractly, amorphously - she often makes references to how what is unsaid is more important than what is expressed, and she makes use of this in her own writing. Many themes reappear throughout the text - writing as a form of expression, selfishness, innocence, language, being seen/read, being a reader, what is real/unreal, honestly too many themes to name. What grounds the book is her two hospital visits as well as her musings on suicide and the desire to no longer exist - in the afterword she says her writing is not necessarily meant to be coherent or consistent, she writes as "an anchor when solidness cannot be felt." I liked her first essay (the titular essay), the most (if I were just rating that essay alone, 5/5). I think she is most direct there, and the gaps she leaves are easier to fill. In the rest of the essays, she draws heavily on the text and ideas of other writers, and I think that is where it becomes harder for me to bridge what she has left unsaid - either due to my lack of context, or perhaps on purpose.
She has a sort of obsession with other writers' letters, and although these are not letters because they were written to be read, they have that vulnerability and intimacy. You feel as if you are reading something never meant to be made public, and for all she writes about wanting privacy, this makes the intrusion even more pronounced. She writes about how when characters are so incoherent they give the feeling they must be a real person - this is how I felt about Li. Oftentimes her writing seemed so strange, her thoughts so confusing to me, that I had no doubt that she was real, and I was receiving her thoughts with no editorialization.
To conclude, the rating is because I felt like I couldn't understand this book in the way it was meant to be read, hopefully I can return to it someday.
TW: suicide
I don't think this rating encompasses entirely how I feel about this book - I'm not sure it's so much a fault with the book or the writing, but my understanding of it. Li writes very lyrically, abstractly, amorphously - she often makes references to how what is unsaid is more important than what is expressed, and she makes use of this in her own writing. Many themes reappear throughout the text - writing as a form of expression, selfishness, innocence, language, being seen/read, being a reader, what is real/unreal, honestly too many themes to name. What grounds the book is her two hospital visits as well as her musings on suicide and the desire to no longer exist - in the afterword she says her writing is not necessarily meant to be coherent or consistent, she writes as "an anchor when solidness cannot be felt." I liked her first essay (the titular essay), the most (if I were just rating that essay alone, 5/5). I think she is most direct there, and the gaps she leaves are easier to fill. In the rest of the essays, she draws heavily on the text and ideas of other writers, and I think that is where it becomes harder for me to bridge what she has left unsaid - either due to my lack of context, or perhaps on purpose.
She has a sort of obsession with other writers' letters, and although these are not letters because they were written to be read, they have that vulnerability and intimacy. You feel as if you are reading something never meant to be made public, and for all she writes about wanting privacy, this makes the intrusion even more pronounced. She writes about how when characters are so incoherent they give the feeling they must be a real person - this is how I felt about Li. Oftentimes her writing seemed so strange, her thoughts so confusing to me, that I had no doubt that she was real, and I was receiving her thoughts with no editorialization.
To conclude, the rating is because I felt like I couldn't understand this book in the way it was meant to be read, hopefully I can return to it someday.