Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017)

Yiyun Li reads writers’ letters, diaries and fiction as a way of approaching difficult questions about language and selfhood. William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield are concrete paths onwards. No acquaintance with them is required, but this is a searching, sometimes demanding memoir rather than an easy collection of cheerful recommendations. Her experience of suicidal depression is central; the attraction is the closeness of one writer’s attention to another.