This is a very special book, written in beautiful language and with totally exposed emotion.  Li is a Chinese-American, MacArthur winning author who emigrated to the US as an immunologist but quickly adopted writing as her life at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where James Alan MacPherson was her teacher.  Drawing on this personal connection as well as one she developed late in his life with William Trevor and drawing upon her favorite authors (Kathryn Mansfield, Hardy, Turgenev, Larkin, Bowen, Pritchett, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, Chekhov, and John McGahern) she describes her two hospitalizations for suicidal depression and the writing that allowed her to face, albeit shakily, life.  Memory, moments, melodrama, music, connections, conversations with writers through their letters and journals, provide her with ‘evidence of time’ enabling her to deal with Larkin’s ‘inherent misery of life’ and Moore’s ‘automatic participation of life.’  She finds books only lead to other books but provide her with the solitude and isolation which she craves since you can never know another person.  “In retrospect, little makes sense’ might be her motto for this achingly beautiful, thought-provoking self-examination.