Writing Into the Abyss After the Death of Two Sons

New York Times

18-05-2025

'Sometimes there is no silver lining in life,' the novelist Yiyun Li observes toward the end of her new memoir, 'Things in Nature Merely Grow,' an elegant, somewhat aloof rumination on the suicide of her son James at 19, in 2024 — six years after the suicide of his older brother, Vincent, then 16. 'Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.'
Li grew up in Beijing, where she was trained as a mathematician, and began her prizewinning literary career in English after moving to the United States in 1996. As befits a writer living in a culture that prefers the foggy euphemism of 'passed away' to 'died,' she wards off the easy sympathy of prospective readers and rejects platitudes about loss and grief. 'Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process,' she writes, 'and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.'
She alludes instead to something she calls 'radical acceptance,' which seems to entail an awareness of being condemned to exist in the 'abyss' that is the aftermath of her sons' deaths while continuing to apply herself to dailiness, to getting out of bed at the regular time, brewing good coffee, reading — Euclid, Shakespeare, Henry James and Wallace Stevens — and writing.
Li's new book comes in the wake of 'Where Reasons End' (2019), a memoir cloaked as a novel in which she wrote about Vincent (here called 'Nikolai'), 'an adamant advocate for the Oxford comma,' a baker, a knitter, a fan of the 17th-century English poet George Herbert, someone who hates people who confuse the oboe (which he plays) with the clarinet and, fatally, a seeker of perfection. Both books are written in unembellished, detached prose that is as involved with itself and its imprecision — 'One can never take words for granted; one cannot always trust words' — as it is with the obdurate fact of the suicides and the boys themselves.
James, like his older brother, who was also his best friend (there are no other siblings), was a self-evident prodigy, a boy who could read fluently while still 'in a diaper,' taught himself Welsh, among a host of other languages, and read the Encyclopedia of the Human Body as a toddler, the better to understand the intricacies of sexual intercourse. Apart from a passing reference to Vincent and James's 'sensitivity and peculiarity,' Li writes about her preternaturally gifted sons as though they were no different from other children; they clearly were, given to witty ripostes and metaphysical asides.
One (Vincent) lived 'feelingly,' the other (James) lived 'thinkingly.' Both seem to have inherited their mother's complex sensibility: a combination of 'keen attention' and 'profound indifference,' a mixture of 'intense emotion and an equally intense apathy.' Inculcated by her in a certain attitude of ambivalence — or, to put it another way, in a tenuousness about entering the fray — they were acutely aware of the likely failure of life to live up to its billing as an inherently meaningful affair and of the fragile nature of the whole earthbound enterprise. When, in 'Where Reasons End,' Nikolai's mother asks him what keeps people going, he answers, 'Rotational inertia.'
Still, none of these speculations about their respective temperaments explains why the boys, seemingly deeply loved and flourishing, decided to opt out so early on. Despite James's abiding anxiety and loneliness — 'in first grade, he explained that his best skill was not to be noticed by anyone' — and a mention of his seeing a therapist, the brothers are not presented as particularly depressed. One wonders what anguish beyond the usual teenage existential despair they were escaping and why they chose the finality of suicide over less extreme expressions of unhappiness or more mediated courses of action.
These are questions Li rarely directly poses but which the reader is inevitably impelled to ask. Were James and Vincent genetically primed for suicide? Li gives us select details about her own past — her childhood in China with a physically and emotionally abusive mother; her own severe depressions during her teenage years; two suicide attempts in 2012, when she was already a mother. (She addresses these events in a 2017 book of essays, 'Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life.') But there is also the reality of her careful, attentive mothering, which includes making customized breakfasts. I imagine she was demanding, perhaps overly ambitious on her sons' behalf, occasionally 'coldly detached,' as she describes herself during a severe depression, but there is no simple toting up of all the factors and arriving at a satisfactory explanation.
'This is not a book about grieving,' Li asserts early on. I would venture that it is instead a commemoration of her sons' brief lives, an elliptical documentation of their vivid, singular presences before they disappeared. 'James's retainers are in a box on his desk,' Li writes. 'Vincent's retainers are in a box on his shelf.' These prosaic details, coming three pages from the end, are shockingly poignant in their invocation of a familiar accouterment of upper-middle-class adolescence.
This book is also about endurance — 'But do you really believe that things will get better?' Vincent asked his mother at 13 — and the limited ways of assuaging suffering. Most of all, I think, it is about the solace to be derived from reading and writing, even while living in an abyss. Lin quotes the poet Philip Larkin's wonderful line, 'Where can we live but days?'
To which I would add: Where can we think about life in all its unforetold horror and moments of great happiness but in books? And so we have this disturbing, inconsolable tribute, a memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away.