The Chinese-American author discusses her breakdown and facing up to the trauma of her past
In the summer and autumn of 2012, Yiyun Li, the award-winning Chinese-American fiction writer, twice tried to kill herself. When she left hospital, everyone was full of advice: “You should do this or that; you must isolate yourself less.” But, she says, “there was a deeper argument I could have only with myself. I needed to dissect, to cut from the inside.” The result of that dissection is her first memoir, a brave set of essays entitled Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.
Li was once described at an event “as an example of the American dream”. In 1996, at the age of 23, she left China for the US, never having written a story, and ended up winning lucrative publishing deals and receiving a MacArthur “genius” grant. But it turns out that the dream was “as superficial and deceitful as an ad placed on the back of a bus”. During her breakdown she felt that “all the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing”.
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