Written in the grip of suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is an uplifting account of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li interweaves personal experiences of her childhood in China and her adulthood forging a new life in America with meditations on the many writers she admires - from William Trevor to Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf to Ivan Turgenev. And with quiet integrity, she confirms the fundamental questions that define an author - why write? And why live?