This memoir reveals the pain of writing in a time of suicidal depression

It is in the very last chapter of her book that Yiyun Li alludes to the question she has been often asked: Why do you write in English?

A professor, one of her advisors at the Iowa Writing Programme, had advised Li against writing in English for it was not her native language. Li refers to Vladimir Nabokov, Russian émigré to the US, who adapted to English and made it magnificently his own.

Nabokov’s explanation on his choice never appeared “satisfying” to his audience. As he said, it made public a tragedy that was also a private grief. Giving up, or losing a language is complex; it is, Li suggests, a conscious need to give up the past. Or to move ahead untrammelled, in a new direction.

As a reader, the coincidence isn’t hard to miss. That Yiyun Li and her equally illustrious contemporary, Jhumpa Lahiri, chose to do something different in a similar phase of their career, when both had two novels and two collections of short stories published to great acclaim. Lahiri made a conscious decision to write in Italian, an exercise in immersion that led to exercises in memoir: In Other Words, followed by the more recent, The Clothing of Books. For Li, writing a memoir or “essays”, as she calls them, was more difficult. It took her two years, a time when she was also in treatment for “suicidal depression”.

Before, after and why

Though there is a “before” and “after” to events, it is the “now” that Yiyun Li is elliptical about. The cause for the depression or when it afflicted Li isn’t clear nor is it necessary for her to explain. In that sense, this book isn’t a straightforward record of facts, or a rigorous enforcement of cause and effect. It isn’t a writer’s manual either, though Li does touch on her conscious decision to write in English.

A decision that could speak for every decision in general, and how such moves impact us, leaving us questioning the possibility of an alternate life. A loss of language, Li tries to explain, is the loss of memory – a turning away from the past.

Yiyun Li began writing in English some years after she moved to the US. She was trained as an immunologist, but moved away to study writing at Iowa, the oldest, and arguably the most prestigious, writing programme in the US. She wrote every day from midnight to around four, while raising a family and working in a laboratory in the morning.

One language for another

It wasn’t, for Li, a matter of constant vigilance the language she chose to write in. For her, there were no fluid lines between a public language and a private one. She used English in her thinking, so that following through every idea in a different language, gave it a new dimension and meaning. But all this comes at a cost. In a dream, where she imagines having a conversation with her sister in China, she realises she does not know what her sister has said, for she speaks in Chinese.

She has never written in Chinese, and yet is often asked if she ever will. At a reading in the US, Li writes about being asked to read her original writings in Chinese. When Li offered instead to read the classical Chinese poets, Li Po or Du Fu, a piece of political protest was preferred.

A writer is never free from a certain context. Li consciously does not dwell much on her earlier life in China – which does appear in her fiction, as in The Vagrants and in her two short story collections. Here she reveals her cloistered family life, a demanding, almost narcissistic mother; there are allusions to grandparents but Li only briefly and very tellingly, touches on her early writing experiences. Things she has left behind.

A memoir is typically largely autobiographical, but this book approaches its subject elliptically and even contrarily. In talking of her writing process, for instance, Li says she has been consciously anti-biographical, preferring to look deep in the “gap” – between what is known (and what Yiyun Li keeps obscure) and what is suggested.

Other writers, other letters

In Dear Friend, Li also looks at other writers trying to explain how they wrote despite their confusions and “darkness”.

The book’s title is taken from Katherine Mansfield’s journals, a New Zealand-born writer who “revealed” more of herself in them and her letters than in her fiction. Yet Virginia Woolf, a contemporary and friend, resented and admired Mansfield’s ability to mould her feelings to her craft of writing. It is interesting, as revealed in Li’s memoir, how writers such as Woolf and the poet Philip Larkin read Mansfield, and of her turbulent private life in her journals, to explain their own selves and weaknesses.

Since this is a book that necessitates re-readings in different ways, Li’s references to Mansfield prompted me to return to a previous chapter. This is where Li asks not how to live but how not to die. The despair and the inability to explain oneself to others is inevitable; yet the persistence in hoping for it is impossible to give up. Shared memories with one, and remembering the past with another, can never be the same.

This creates “melodrama”, an illusion of sharing, and raises false hopes of returning to an impossible pristine state. It is to trap another person in the memories of one’s making, as Li reads in Stefan Zweig’s writing and especially in his last suicide note. The Austrian-Jewish writer who fled Europe and took refuge in Brazil, committed suicide with his wife Lotte, in 1942. The cryptic note left behind was “deliberate”, for he did not want to make a spectacle of their own lives amidst the far greater tragedy the world then faced.

Reading William Trevor

About the only writer Li does seek out is William Trevor, who died recently. For many years, she had carried with her Trevor’s book Two Lives, which consists of two novellas, Reading Turgenev (her favourite Trevor work) and My House in Umbria. It was one of Trevor’s short stories that made Li see the world and want to write in a certain way. Yet even “seeking” out Trevor, writing to him for a meeting, leaves Li ambivalent, second-guessing his response.

What is revealed is ambiguous, yet lingering. Trevor writes, as he tries to tell Li, out of “curiosity and bewilderment”. Both Trevor and Li remember their characters long after they have been written down and the novel or the story have seen completion. Yet some mysteries of writing can never truly be shared. She notices Trevor’s arrested expression when an unfamiliar lady crosses their path, and confesses to not understanding what it is that Trevor hopes she will “see” in turn.

Reticence and honesty

There is much that is obscure in this book, and honest. “We’ve waited this out”, Li writes towards the end, as this book was written after her stay and recovery in the hospital. She has always been uncomfortable about writing in first person. The essays, complete in themselves, are also a marker, something one returns to, and a necessary stage for the writer, Li, herself. Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is not an easy book, leaving many questions for the reader.

In some ways, Li is trying to ask the questions that matter: how do we think, and why do we think the way we do? What language do we think and dream in and are these always the same? What about the possibility of an alternate, “inner” life? And then the contradiction – the need to understand oneself and to “rebel”, as Li does, against this understanding. Finally, in a world fixated by the social media, Dear Friend… tells us of the wisdom gained from a lifetime of reading.

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Yiyun Li, Random House