A review by foggy_rosamund
Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

4.0

Struggling with suicidal depression, Yiyun Li writes about literature, and how, while it does not help her, it sustains her. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning she feels "the world of books is still the world." Her writing is sophisticated, philosophical, and sometimes hard to digest. She writes about despair dispassionately and with perhaps too little empathy. But I found this book very rewarding: it is an exploration of the unsayable, of the places literature cannot reach. Yiyun Li has a unique perspective on depression, and her own autobiographical or semi-autobiographical insights are thought-provoking. The blurb describes this book as "uplifting", which is not true: Li is factual and ambivalent, and this book does not try to be optimistic. But for all that I found it very helpful -- perhaps because it is so rare to find a description of depression that feels authentic and escapes the usual mould of Despair + Therapy = Recovery. This book is unafraid to challenge the reader and to face complexity.