Here’s What To Read If You’re Sick Of The Stigma Around Mental Illness

In her first memoir, Yiyun Li is a scientist-turned-literary-darling writing about depression, so you’d expect her prose to be methodical and her characterization of the disease concrete. But Dear Friend, from My Life, I Write to You in Your Life isn’t as airless as that. It’s not an empirical study of mental illness, but a collection of very personal observations, a story as poetic and wending as its title. Li was born in Beijing and served in the Chinese military for one year before immigrating to America, an experience that makes its way into the book. Settling in Iowa, she studied immunology before also studying nonfiction and fiction writing. Her interest in science could be familial ― her father was a nuclear physicist ― but her passion for stories is rooted in her childhood, when she read incomplete portions of serialized Victorian novels and whatever she could find at her local library, where she volunteered. Li writes elliptically about her first forays into fiction, her fraught relationships with her family, her years spent in China, and the aspects of American culture that stood out to her upon immigrating. (The concreteness of “before and after” images in magazines seemed to her like a fairy tale ― aspirational and befuddling.) The stylistic choice is a good one; it matches her experience of depression, which also hit her in fits. It’s reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s essays, which proceed as thoughts might, makin...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news