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

Here's the best way to say how much I like this book: when I read, I turn down the corners of pages to remind me to write down a memorable quote later. In good books I might do this a few times, in great books a few dozen times. In my copy of Dear Friend (see left), almost every other corner is turned down. It's a hard book to describe, beginning with its unwieldy title (a quote from Katherine Mansfield): it's a book of essays, but it reads like a single, desperate search for meaning. It's a memoir of changing cultures and languages, of surviving the desire for suicide, of choosing to be a writer, but it doesn't have the tidy shape of the usual memoir. Li lives by writing and reading, and it feels like no exaggeration to say her life is at stake every time she picks up her pen. It might be the best book I read this year; I'll be rereading it before the year's out to be sure.