Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Started this book over a year ago, stopped at page 35. Felt I wasn’t in a good enough place to read it.
Finished it today. This book was a recommendation from the shop keeper, after I had asked for something with light in it.
This book feels like an afternoon spent under the branches of a tree; luminous at times, too bright to keep your eyes open, and you get lost figuring out shapes in the clouds of the author’s thoughts. I resonated with her relationship to language; writing; memory.
This memoir feels like a delicate watercolor.

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sarapocher98's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

A beautiful, quiet yet heartfelt meditation on life and death, writing and reading, and what makes life worth living.

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stephanie_co's review against another edition

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emotional informative slow-paced

2.5

Just didn't love the writing style and felt that because the author tried so hard to distance herself from the subject that I found myself not caring about the story at all. Very philosophical which isn't really my favorite

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sincerelydebi's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.0

Wow! What an intense and heartbreaking story.

I picked this one up sort of randomly, for research I was doing. It was completely different from what I was expecting to read, and I definitely felt the weight of everything that was said.

There are a lot of TRIGGER WARNINGS in this book.

Mostly: suicide, depression, death, murder etc.

I will say I loved Yiyun’s writing, the way she was able to make me feel, question, and understand my own thoughts at certain times felt wild to me. I’ll definitely be reading another book from her.

Quotes:

To exist as fully as the world expects one to, yet to remain absent inwardly: not equipped with words to articulate the secret I nevertheless understood it at a formative age.

Sometimes I suspect that I am drawn to those who don’t converse with me because I have not outgrown a childish wish that they will teach me how to live.

How could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? How could you have forgotten those who love you? These questions were asked, again and again. But love is the wrong thing to question. One does not will oneself to love; one does not kill oneself because one ceases to love. The difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves. My muddle, in retrospect, is clear: I had underestimated my aversion to wanting anything; I had overestimated my capacity to want nothing.

One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.

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