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Chicago Tribune
12-07-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: Yiyun Li writes about life after her sons' suicides in ‘Things in Nature Merely Grow'
When I heard what Yiyun Li's new book, 'Things in Nature Merely Grow,' was about, my first thought was that I could never read it. The book was written in the aftermath of the suicide of her son James in 2024 at age 19, which followed the previous suicide of her son Vincent at age 16 in 2017. These plain facts seem unbearable, a loss beyond comprehension, and I could not imagine an encounter with this kind of grief. But soon I could not shake the idea that if someone had been able to write through these circumstances, I had to read it. 'Things in Nature Merely Grow' is, in fact, not a book about grief. Li writes, 'I am against the word, 'grief,' which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an endpoint: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living and the less awkward people around you will feel.' Li goes on to say she is not interested in such endings. 'I don't want an endpoint to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. … Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.' The book then is about what Li calls life inside an 'abyss,' the abyss marked by the deaths of her children. This is very much still a life filled with activities like gardening, piano lessons, time with friends, and of course writing because Li is a writer. Writing is her work, but it is also more than that. The chapters are organized as brief essays extending from an event that triggers thoughts and associations which Li gathers, not necessarily to make sense of — because this is sometimes not possible — but to notice. This starts with the opening chapter as she explores the words the authorities used both times she and her husband were notified of a child's death, 'There's no good way to say this.' This sentence becomes both a warning to the reader, and by the end, a statement of triumph. There is no way to say this, except over the course of these 23 chapters, many things have been said. We come to see James, a savant-like genius who speaks and reads half a dozen languages and is bringing up the Higgs-Boson particle at the dinner table as a grade-schooler. He is shy and kind and we learn that he and Vincent seemed to take a particular delight in each other, brothers and best friends. It feels tragic that these marvelous young people are not in the world, but also miraculous that they had time in the world together. Li resists becoming the sage or offering advice. She is living in this abyss, writing from this place that she cannot and in many ways does not want to escape because it is where her children remain. After reading the book, I do not know if I truly have any better understanding of what it means to live with this loss, but perhaps this is Li's point. 'Things in Nature Merely Grow' suggests a fatalistic worldview. There is no purpose beyond growth and this growth ends with death. These things have happened. Lives continue. What is the alternative? John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'Original Sin' by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson 2. 'Scoop' by Evelyn Waugh 3. 'Stella Maris' by Cormac McCarthy 4. 'The Passenger' by Cormac McCarthy 5. 'Turning Life into Fiction' by Robin HemleyI'm going to take a shot with a book I think Mike won't know, but should have a pretty good pull in terms of plot and action, 'The Devil All the Time' by Donald Ray Pollock. 1. 'Dream State' by Eric Puchner 2. 'The Names' by Florence Knapp 3. 'Murder in the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story' by Rich Cohen 4. 'The World Played Chess' by Robert Dugoni 5. 'The Berry Pickers' by Amanda PetersFor Audrey, I'm recommending a great mix of drama and mystery, 'So Much Pretty' by Cara Hoffman. 1. 'Innocent' by Scott Turow 2. 'Presumed Innocent' by Scott Turow 3. 'Blood Brotherhoods: A History of Italy's Three Mafias' by John Dickie 4. 'The Red Sparrow Trilogy' by Jason Matthews 5. 'Moscow X' by David McCloskeyI'm hoping Nate has not yet dipped into Mick Herron's 'Slow Horses' series because he's in for some pleasurable hours of making his way through. Get a reading from the Biblioracle Send a list of the last five books you've read and your hometown to biblioracle@
The Age
08-07-2025
- General
- The Age
A seismically moving account of living with the unimaginable
GRIEF Things in Nature Merely Grow Yiyun Li 4th Estate, $32.99 'There is no good way to state these facts,' Yiyun Li writes at the outset of Things in Nature Merely Grow. 'My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide'. Conceived as a fictional dialogue with her late son, Li's book for Vincent, Where Reasons End, appeared in 2019. Things in Nature Merely Grow, her attempt to describe James, is a revelation. Each book honours, in its address, the very different personalities of her two sons. Vincent, Li writes, felt deeply. James, by contrast, was a thinker. When Vincent, long-haired and 'flamboyantly handsome', dies, James stops cutting his hair. A subdued child 'who resisted drawing any attention to himself', such acts, Li suggests, reveal how close each boy was to the other. Li communes with James by abiding with the things he loved: geometry and Euclid, linguistic logic and Wittgenstein. Hers is an act of radical acceptance. She continues writing, continues teaching, continues gardening (gardening is a good discipline, she says, for a writer; it teaches patience). Life's activities are time-bound. They do not compete with her loss. How could they? Her children, she writes, are timeless. Confronted by acquaintances, strangers, well-wishers and passersby, Li must consider how to speak of herself, 'a mother who no longer has children'. The word 'mother' becomes dissociative, its noun form politely parting ways with the verb form. She is a parent who can no longer parent. Yet some verbs do not change. Li finds that the action 'to be' remains dutifully intact: 'Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now.' Often she finds herself explaining her situation to those who lack the courage or ability to face it. Some friends refuse to believe loss has not also claimed some portion of Li's essence ('not all of them treat me as the intellectual equal of my old self', she says – a bleakly harrowing admission). One friend, astonishingly, tells Li her own child is at college and thus compares her situation to Li's since she is unable to see the child very often. Li is stoically upbraiding ('Sometimes people want to play a part in a tragedy that is, thankfully, not theirs personally'). How brave, how abhorrent, how stark, how impossible, I thought, this clarity.
Sydney Morning Herald
08-07-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
A seismically moving account of living with the unimaginable
GRIEF Things in Nature Merely Grow Yiyun Li 4th Estate, $32.99 'There is no good way to state these facts,' Yiyun Li writes at the outset of Things in Nature Merely Grow. 'My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide'. Conceived as a fictional dialogue with her late son, Li's book for Vincent, Where Reasons End, appeared in 2019. Things in Nature Merely Grow, her attempt to describe James, is a revelation. Each book honours, in its address, the very different personalities of her two sons. Vincent, Li writes, felt deeply. James, by contrast, was a thinker. When Vincent, long-haired and 'flamboyantly handsome', dies, James stops cutting his hair. A subdued child 'who resisted drawing any attention to himself', such acts, Li suggests, reveal how close each boy was to the other. Li communes with James by abiding with the things he loved: geometry and Euclid, linguistic logic and Wittgenstein. Hers is an act of radical acceptance. She continues writing, continues teaching, continues gardening (gardening is a good discipline, she says, for a writer; it teaches patience). Life's activities are time-bound. They do not compete with her loss. How could they? Her children, she writes, are timeless. Confronted by acquaintances, strangers, well-wishers and passersby, Li must consider how to speak of herself, 'a mother who no longer has children'. The word 'mother' becomes dissociative, its noun form politely parting ways with the verb form. She is a parent who can no longer parent. Yet some verbs do not change. Li finds that the action 'to be' remains dutifully intact: 'Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now.' Often she finds herself explaining her situation to those who lack the courage or ability to face it. Some friends refuse to believe loss has not also claimed some portion of Li's essence ('not all of them treat me as the intellectual equal of my old self', she says – a bleakly harrowing admission). One friend, astonishingly, tells Li her own child is at college and thus compares her situation to Li's since she is unable to see the child very often. Li is stoically upbraiding ('Sometimes people want to play a part in a tragedy that is, thankfully, not theirs personally'). How brave, how abhorrent, how stark, how impossible, I thought, this clarity.
Scroll.in
04-07-2025
- General
- Scroll.in
Yiyun Li lost both her sons to suicide. Her new memoir reveals her as a very special writer
'My husband and I had two children and lost them both,' writes Yiyun Li early in her latest book, Things in Nature Merely Grow. And then, with harrowing directness, 'Both chose suicide'. Such loss might seem at odds with the title of growth, but as she explains in her deeply thoughtful, rigorous account of a family tragedy, it reflects insights developed through the practice of gardening. 'Things in nature merely grow until it's time for them to die' – and gardeners must learn to develop patience, flexibility and openness to what may come. Such capacities are very useful for writers, and Li is a prolific author who brings to her writing a forensic, incisive perspective, along with a marvellous deployment of language and tone. Born and raised in China, Li migrated to the United States in 1996 with the intention of completing a doctorate in immunology. But, she says, 'I wanted to do something I loved'. That turned out to be writing. In 2005, she added a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Iowa to her Bachelor of Science and research master's in immunology. I imagine these qualifications, along with her nuclear physicist father, provided deep immersion in the scientific method – and led to her writing style, imbued with systematic observation and analysis. Li's first book, the short-story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, was the inaugural winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. In 2010, she was included in the New Yorker's 20 best writers under 40 and won a MacArthur 'genius' grant. Since then, she has received cabinet of further awards. Across her work, Li consistently explores difficult issues – as writers generally do. In many cases, the topic and content draw on her experiences as the child of an abusive mother, and as a young woman living under the strictures of China in the post-Tiananmen Square period. Years after her migration, she experienced a major depressive episode and was hospitalised following suicide attempts. Out of this experience, she wrote her first memoir (in essays), Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017). Her collection explores what it means when one finds, or feels, that 'all the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing'. It is a deeply moving book, while managing to avoid becoming bleak or sentimental. She writes in ways that illuminate what reading can do for a person who is suffering, offering techniques for living well – or well enough. Improbably, impossibly cruel But when she wrote Dear Friend, she had not yet experienced how much sorrow was to come. Just months after its publication, her elder son, Vincent, then 16, died by suicide. She responded by writing a novel, Where Reasons End (2019), which takes the form of a conversation between a mother and the son who, like Vincent, had decided not to remain among the living. Anthony Cummins writes, 'its tone is both astringent and faintly mischievous': an extraordinary achievement under such circumstances. Six years later, in what seems an improbably, impossibly cruel event, her second son James, aged 19, also died by suicide. Again, Li turned to reading and to writing. This time, she selected nonfiction, resulting in Things in Nature Merely Grow. She explains this decision: Vincent lived feelingly. James lived thinkingly. When Vincent died, I was able to conjure him up in a book by feeling, but I knew, right after James died, that I would not be able to do that for him. James would not like a book written from feelings. This book is James' story; but it is also the story of Vincent, his beloved older brother – and of Li herself and her husband, and their life in the permanent absence of their sons. A very special kind of writer It is not an easy book. I had to take a break after each chapter or two, to reset my emotional state so that I could read it as a reviewer, and not as a parent. The first line of the first chapter warns readers: 'There is no good way to say this'. A bit further into the volume, she writes: This book is about life's extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be. This book will neither ask the questions you may want me to ask nor provide the closure you may expect the book to offer. What she does provide is clarity, precision, close observation. Despite the 'extremities', she reports on the situation – from the moment of the police arriving to announce James' death, right through to her arriving at a 'radical acceptance' of how she must now live. This approach reminds me forcibly of Joan Didion's account of the sudden death of her husband, in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Robert McCrum argued this book changed the pattern of grief writings, which evolved from 'misery memoir' to literature. He observes, 'you have to be a very special kind of writer to find the detachment to examine a devastating personal loss'. Li is, like Didion, that 'very special kind of writer', and it is her capacity to observe and examine that makes this volume such a significant contribution to the literature on mourning. Is it detachment? The tone is thoughtful; in a way, both scientific and analytical. In an interview, Li noted both she and Didion 'focus on their thoughts, rather than their feelings'. This is, I imagine, a useful way of getting by, rather than collapsing from the overburden of feelings. But I suspect the voice both Li and Didion use models detachment, rather than in fact being detached or aloof. They attend to the 'what is' of where they find themselves – and this choice affords a clarity of seeing and writing. There seems to me a deep investment in such writing: not striving to 'make sense' of something that exists outside sense, but rather finding a way to look at it directly. It is, perhaps, akin to Graham Greene's ' splinter of ice in the heart of a writer': a splinter that provides a standpoint from which one can build at least temporary stability in the midst of turmoil. A primer for mourning The terms very much in my own mind as I read this book were 'clarity' and 'precision'. Li applies both as she lays out the way such losses alter the world; or rather, alter one's being in the world. She reads copiously and cites widely – Euclid, Shakespeare, Euripides, Montaigne, C.S. Lewis, Albert Camus, Henry James, Wallace Stevens. And while she observes there may be consolations in writing and reading, she does not offer either as treatment or panacea. Instead, she writes: Writing, offering a transient refuge, is an approximation of salvation, nothing more. Who among us stands a chance facing an abyss? There are no empty consolations, no promises of resolution. But there is a great deal of wisdom and discussion of how one might come to understand and accommodate loss. Manifestly, she loved and continues to love her sons. But 'more important than loving', she writes, 'is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives'. In this respect, the book is something of a primer for those who mourn. She models how she came to the point of radical acceptance, and offers insights and advice to the freshly bereaved. For example: get enough rest, eat, and exercise, work, and find ways to live in this new state. Because she writes: If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one's habitat. The book also offers advice for those seeking to engage with mourners. If you're sending flowers, she suggests, deliver them in a vase – the mourner will lack the energy to find a vase and trim and arrange the flowers. Also: don't offer advice; don't avoid the mourner; do talk about the person they have lost. Not consoling, but wise Things in Nature Merely Grow is an essay as much as it is a memoir. An essay on what death can mean, and does mean, and might be. An essay on suicide; on the loss of a child or children; the complexities of parenting; the joys of loving. It unfolds the paths that emerge from initial shock through to the capacity to reflect on what this entails. It is – and I use the term advisedly – wise. It draws on literature, philosophy, maths: all that deep knowledge we humans have been collecting over centuries and millennia. Do they provide consolation? Probably not. But they provide context. And context can bring at least an intellectual understanding – and hope that an emotional understanding, or at least an accommodation, might follow.
New Indian Express
20-06-2025
- General
- New Indian Express
‘Radical acceptance': Yiyun Li lost both her sons to suicide. Her rigorous memoir reveals her as a very special writer
'My husband and I had two children and lost them both,' writes Yiyun Li early in her latest book, Things in Nature Merely Grow. And then, with harrowing directness, 'Both chose suicide'. Such loss might seem at odds with the title of growth, but as she explains in her deeply thoughtful, rigorous account of a family tragedy, it reflects insights developed through the practice of gardening. 'Things in nature merely grow until it's time for them to die' – and gardeners must learn to develop patience, flexibility and openness to what may come. Such capacities are very useful for writers, and Li is a prolific author who brings to her writing a forensic, incisive perspective, along with a marvellous deployment of language and tone. Born and raised in China, Li migrated to the United States in 1996 with the intention of completing a doctorate in immunology. But, she says, 'I wanted to do something I loved'. That turned out to be writing. In 2005, she added a master of fine arts (MFA) from University of Iowa to her bachelor of science and research masters in immunology. I imagine these qualifications, along with her nuclear physicist father, provided deep immersion in the scientific method – and led to her writing style, imbued with systematic observation and analysis. Li's first book, the short-story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, was the inaugural winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. In 2010, she was included in the New Yorker's 20 best writers under 40 and won a MacArthur 'genius' grant. Since then, she has received cabinets of further awards. Across her work, Li consistently explores difficult issues – as writers generally do. In many cases, the topic and content draw on her experiences as the child of an abusive mother, and as a young woman living under the strictures of China in the post-Tiananmen Square period. Years after her migration, she experienced a major depressive episode and was hospitalised following suicide attempts. Out of this experience, she wrote her first memoir (in essays), Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017).
