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Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.
“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”
There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. 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.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”
There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. 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.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published May 20, 2025
367 people are currently reading
15783 people want to read
About the author
Yiyun Li
59 books1,721 followersYiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 519 reviews
August 11, 2025
there's nothing like a memoir.
yiyun li has been through more in one life than any one person should have to face, and the wisdom and clarity with which she writes about them is incomprehensible.
i don't know what else to say.
bottom line: i can't believe this book.
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
yiyun li has been through more in one life than any one person should have to face, and the wisdom and clarity with which she writes about them is incomprehensible.
i don't know what else to say.
bottom line: i can't believe this book.
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
August 27, 2025
“There is no good way to say this—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough.”
Things in Nature Merely Grow is a memoir written after the suicide of the author’s second son. The author has two children, Vincent and James. However, both of their young lives were cut tragically short at the ages of 16 and 19.
Things in Nature is highly readable—Yiyun Li has such a rich and expansive vocabulary, and there is a beauty in the simplicity of her prose.
One of the key themes explored is the loneliness that can accompany being extremely high-functioning. My gosh is this relatable.
“Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.”
“When Vincent was five, I thought of signing him up for a soccer club, and he informed me, with utter seriousness, that I would be doing that not for his happiness, but because I wanted him to be like the other children.”
Mic drop.
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Vincent feels like Seymour Glass.
One day after picking up James from kindergarten, Li noticed that he wore a self-made sign, “IM NOt TaLKING Because I DON’t WaNT TO!”
Preach it, buddy! My gosh……most people talk just to keep their lips moving, no sound greater than the sound of their own voice. Or perhaps just to keep themselves awake. However, most people don’t have many particularly interesting or unique insights. Why engage in a meaningless conversation when most people haven’t even read the book or have a conversation just regurgitating the facts that could be easily found on Wikipedia? If a unique insight is shared, it would be met with blank stares or inattention.
“For a school writing contest, instead of turning in a patriotic essay praising the glory and beauty of our mother China, I wrote a piece decrying the hypocrisy of such contests, and then elaborating on the ugliness of life a child experienced while being forced to lie about it.”
“Decrying” – what a verb!
This is essentially tone down your light, because your brightness makes other people uncomfortable. In other words, mask. Pretend to fit in. Then, talk about how awesome it is to fit in. Yeah…….
“His best skill was not to be noticed by anyone.”
Most of my life – heck I still feel this way most of the time – is that I am invisible. When you don’t talk non-stop, when your voice isn’t the loudest, when you don’t grab someone on a TikTok in the first 5 seconds, you are easily discarded and discounted. People don’t even look up from their forsaken Smartphones to see your light.
“Very few people deserve to see your tears.”
I would go further – very few people deserve to experience the gift of you. The world is massively disappointing most of the time. That’s why I love F. Scott Fitzgerald—because he has relentless hope, optimism, and cheer in a world full of disappointment, cruelty, and the careless.
“Very few people will prefer to say: I would prefer not to.”
This results from societal conditioning to make other people comfortable. We are taught by countless voices that to be weird is worse than being unknown. But, I would counter that being unknown is worse than being weird.
“These are but pebbles that should not and will not stop me.”
Caveat: Yiyun Li, at one point, writes, “A few years ago, a young woman spent two days with me for a profile for The New York Times, and for that interview (as for all the other interviews), I made it clear that I would not answer any questions about my husband and James.” Towards the end of the book, there is this passage, “When Tom came to visit for a second time, he spoke about his sojourn in a New York City psychiatric hospital not too long before. ‘There I turned the corner, and guess who was coming down the hallway? [Insert name of celebrity].’” On the one hand, the author would like privacy for her family, yet she outs someone who is privately seeking mental assistance? This book is strong enough on its own without this needless name-dropping.
The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $19.30 from Pango
Audiobook – Free through Libby
Connect With Me!
Blog Threads BookTube Facebook Insta My Bookstore at Pango
Things in Nature Merely Grow is a memoir written after the suicide of the author’s second son. The author has two children, Vincent and James. However, both of their young lives were cut tragically short at the ages of 16 and 19.
Things in Nature is highly readable—Yiyun Li has such a rich and expansive vocabulary, and there is a beauty in the simplicity of her prose.
One of the key themes explored is the loneliness that can accompany being extremely high-functioning. My gosh is this relatable.
“Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.”
“When Vincent was five, I thought of signing him up for a soccer club, and he informed me, with utter seriousness, that I would be doing that not for his happiness, but because I wanted him to be like the other children.”
Mic drop.
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Vincent feels like Seymour Glass.
One day after picking up James from kindergarten, Li noticed that he wore a self-made sign, “IM NOt TaLKING Because I DON’t WaNT TO!”
Preach it, buddy! My gosh……most people talk just to keep their lips moving, no sound greater than the sound of their own voice. Or perhaps just to keep themselves awake. However, most people don’t have many particularly interesting or unique insights. Why engage in a meaningless conversation when most people haven’t even read the book or have a conversation just regurgitating the facts that could be easily found on Wikipedia? If a unique insight is shared, it would be met with blank stares or inattention.
“For a school writing contest, instead of turning in a patriotic essay praising the glory and beauty of our mother China, I wrote a piece decrying the hypocrisy of such contests, and then elaborating on the ugliness of life a child experienced while being forced to lie about it.”
“Decrying” – what a verb!
This is essentially tone down your light, because your brightness makes other people uncomfortable. In other words, mask. Pretend to fit in. Then, talk about how awesome it is to fit in. Yeah…….
“His best skill was not to be noticed by anyone.”
Most of my life – heck I still feel this way most of the time – is that I am invisible. When you don’t talk non-stop, when your voice isn’t the loudest, when you don’t grab someone on a TikTok in the first 5 seconds, you are easily discarded and discounted. People don’t even look up from their forsaken Smartphones to see your light.
“Very few people deserve to see your tears.”
I would go further – very few people deserve to experience the gift of you. The world is massively disappointing most of the time. That’s why I love F. Scott Fitzgerald—because he has relentless hope, optimism, and cheer in a world full of disappointment, cruelty, and the careless.
“Very few people will prefer to say: I would prefer not to.”
This results from societal conditioning to make other people comfortable. We are taught by countless voices that to be weird is worse than being unknown. But, I would counter that being unknown is worse than being weird.
“These are but pebbles that should not and will not stop me.”
Caveat: Yiyun Li, at one point, writes, “A few years ago, a young woman spent two days with me for a profile for The New York Times, and for that interview (as for all the other interviews), I made it clear that I would not answer any questions about my husband and James.” Towards the end of the book, there is this passage, “When Tom came to visit for a second time, he spoke about his sojourn in a New York City psychiatric hospital not too long before. ‘There I turned the corner, and guess who was coming down the hallway? [Insert name of celebrity].’” On the one hand, the author would like privacy for her family, yet she outs someone who is privately seeking mental assistance? This book is strong enough on its own without this needless name-dropping.
The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $19.30 from Pango
Audiobook – Free through Libby
Connect With Me!
Blog Threads BookTube Facebook Insta My Bookstore at Pango
September 7, 2025
Loved this. A deeply sad and cogent memoir by a mother and writer whose two sons died by suicide. Yiyun Li’s prose is intentionally thought-oriented as opposed to feeling-oriented, though her deep love and care for her children is evident on every page.
For my fellow psychology folks or people who’ve benefitted from and/or practice(d) Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), this memoir is a masterclass in practicing radical acceptance in the face of unimaginable loss and suffering. Li directly names radical acceptance and DBT a couple of times in this memoir and it was so touching (and heartbreaking) to read. As someone who’s faced a lot of trauma and grief in my own life in different ways than Li, I’ve benefitted a lot from applying radical acceptance and DBT to my own life so I felt a lot of solidarity reading this book (DBT isn’t the only modality that’s helped me or that I practice from, and it’s excellent imo).
Also appreciated when Li let some emotion out toward the end when she wrote about what was helpful and not helpful to receive from strangers in reaction to her loss. As she says you don’t need to say “I understand” – in fact you probably don’t understand given that the experience is different from yours. There are other ways to express sympathy and to honor someone else’s pain. Anyway, even though Li writes that she’s not a fan of the word “grief,” I found this memoir a restrained, powerful testament on living even with the pain of grief that will persist everyday. Big thank you to Li for writing it.
For my fellow psychology folks or people who’ve benefitted from and/or practice(d) Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), this memoir is a masterclass in practicing radical acceptance in the face of unimaginable loss and suffering. Li directly names radical acceptance and DBT a couple of times in this memoir and it was so touching (and heartbreaking) to read. As someone who’s faced a lot of trauma and grief in my own life in different ways than Li, I’ve benefitted a lot from applying radical acceptance and DBT to my own life so I felt a lot of solidarity reading this book (DBT isn’t the only modality that’s helped me or that I practice from, and it’s excellent imo).
Also appreciated when Li let some emotion out toward the end when she wrote about what was helpful and not helpful to receive from strangers in reaction to her loss. As she says you don’t need to say “I understand” – in fact you probably don’t understand given that the experience is different from yours. There are other ways to express sympathy and to honor someone else’s pain. Anyway, even though Li writes that she’s not a fan of the word “grief,” I found this memoir a restrained, powerful testament on living even with the pain of grief that will persist everyday. Big thank you to Li for writing it.
May 7, 2025
This is a beautiful grief memoir. It is focused so much on thinking around death and suicide and less around feeling (by design). I loved that shift in approach. The writing is gorgeous and the way she interacts with other art objects is moving.
May 30, 2025
i usually let my reviews flow, unfiltered thoughts about a book just rushing out of me — i can’t seem to do that with “things in nature merely grow”. there is a preciseness to yiyun li’s use of language in this book that i want to give the same care as i write this (initial review)
i have read plenty of books, and watched as many movies about people going through loss, and the uniqueness each one of them hold.
no two “griefs”— a word i’m being careful to use, as yiyun li expressed in her book— are ever the same.
yiyun lic an author i love, prose holding weight despite the seeming emotional detachment you encounter at face value, the origins of this style i have come to understand better as i read this book.
“there’s no easy way to say this” is the way the book starts— and there really is none.
yiyun li’s two sons both died by s—cide seven years apart. vincent, at 16, in 2017. james, at 19, in 2024. these are facts, and we will come to befriend facts very well in this book. a life thrown to the extremes.
things in nature merely grow is li’s third book that touches on the sensitive nature of s—cide.
“dear friend, from my life i write to you in your life” about her own struggles with depression. “where reasons end” a heartbreaking work of fiction about an imagined conversation between a mother and her deceased son, dedicated to vincent.
finally, “things in nature merely grow”, a book that is intentionally a work of non-fiction, reflecting on the “thinking” nature of james, a book dedicated to her son who died in 2024. recognizing that nothing work of feeling will come close, that even a fact-based non-fiction approach can only be an approximation.
three books about a topic so heavy, with additional weight knowing that this is the author’s very own life.
yet. and yet. yiyun li writes with an acceptance that feels unfamiliar in our usual vocabulary of grief and mourning. without attempting to reason or explain, she writes with preciseness and care and understanding in what can only be explained as one of the worst things a parent can experience.
she looks at it, as the title puts it perfectly — things in nature merely grow. gardens, plants, and flowers hold no meaning except for one goal: to live. such is life. hard as it may be.
hard as it may be, and i can not even pretend to understand, yiyun li’s work is about a mother that processes best through writing. there is no attempt at healing, or closure, or even to overcome “grief” — “my sadness is not a burden” she says. it is a book about continuing to live, and to go on. despite. despite. despite.
this barely scratches the surface of my thoughts on this book, and is easily one of the most beautifully written exploration of loss i have ever read, and all i hope for yiyun li from now on is ease and comfort and warmth and lightness. to go on living, and sit beside the loss and the love that comes with it.
(this is just an initial review)
i have read plenty of books, and watched as many movies about people going through loss, and the uniqueness each one of them hold.
no two “griefs”— a word i’m being careful to use, as yiyun li expressed in her book— are ever the same.
yiyun lic an author i love, prose holding weight despite the seeming emotional detachment you encounter at face value, the origins of this style i have come to understand better as i read this book.
“there’s no easy way to say this” is the way the book starts— and there really is none.
yiyun li’s two sons both died by s—cide seven years apart. vincent, at 16, in 2017. james, at 19, in 2024. these are facts, and we will come to befriend facts very well in this book. a life thrown to the extremes.
things in nature merely grow is li’s third book that touches on the sensitive nature of s—cide.
“dear friend, from my life i write to you in your life” about her own struggles with depression. “where reasons end” a heartbreaking work of fiction about an imagined conversation between a mother and her deceased son, dedicated to vincent.
finally, “things in nature merely grow”, a book that is intentionally a work of non-fiction, reflecting on the “thinking” nature of james, a book dedicated to her son who died in 2024. recognizing that nothing work of feeling will come close, that even a fact-based non-fiction approach can only be an approximation.
three books about a topic so heavy, with additional weight knowing that this is the author’s very own life.
yet. and yet. yiyun li writes with an acceptance that feels unfamiliar in our usual vocabulary of grief and mourning. without attempting to reason or explain, she writes with preciseness and care and understanding in what can only be explained as one of the worst things a parent can experience.
she looks at it, as the title puts it perfectly — things in nature merely grow. gardens, plants, and flowers hold no meaning except for one goal: to live. such is life. hard as it may be.
hard as it may be, and i can not even pretend to understand, yiyun li’s work is about a mother that processes best through writing. there is no attempt at healing, or closure, or even to overcome “grief” — “my sadness is not a burden” she says. it is a book about continuing to live, and to go on. despite. despite. despite.
this barely scratches the surface of my thoughts on this book, and is easily one of the most beautifully written exploration of loss i have ever read, and all i hope for yiyun li from now on is ease and comfort and warmth and lightness. to go on living, and sit beside the loss and the love that comes with it.
(this is just an initial review)
January 14, 2025
Such a beautiful book -- deeply felt and beautifully wrought. In the face of unspeakable tragedy, Yiyun Li is somehow able to make sense of the insensible. A grief memoir unlike any else, comparable only to Joan Didion's BLUE NIGHTS in my mind. Yiyun Li is one of the greatest writers working and thinking, THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW is a testament to that.
July 18, 2025
Things in Nature Merely Grow - Yiyun Li
"لقد رفضت دائماً استخدام كلمة ”حزن“ ونادراً ما استخدمت كلمة ”حداد“ - ... هذا ليس كتابًا عن الحزن أو الحداد."
"أشعر بذهول شديد وجروح عميقة من الحياة."
"لستَ مُلزمًا قطْ على إظهار ألمك للعالم."
"الموت صعب. والحياة أصعب. والأصعب من ذلك الاستمرار في الحياة عندما تُمزقها وفياتٌ أبدية. يستغرق الأمر لحظة واحدة ليصبح الموت حقيقةً واقعة، نقطةً واحدةً في خطٍّ زمني، تَطمس كل شيءٍ من الماضي وتَقضي على أي إمكانية للمستقبل."
~
...
هل بكيت خلال قراءة هذا الكتاب الصغير؟
نعم، بكيت كما لم أبك قط-ربما يقترب من تأثري به كتاب الكاتبة السابق.
كتاب حزين ومؤثر وفي عالم مليء بموت الأطفال هذا كتاب عن حزن عائلة وأم بعد خسارة ابن آخر.
لا يمكن تقييم أحزان الآخرين... ولذا لا أجد أيَّّ كلمات أكتبها عن هذا الكتاب، وهذه كانت مقالات مؤثرة وتفطر القلب.
"لقد رفضت دائماً استخدام كلمة ”حزن“ ونادراً ما استخدمت كلمة ”حداد“ - ... هذا ليس كتابًا عن الحزن أو الحداد."
"أشعر بذهول شديد وجروح عميقة من الحياة."
"لستَ مُلزمًا قطْ على إظهار ألمك للعالم."
"الموت صعب. والحياة أصعب. والأصعب من ذلك الاستمرار في الحياة عندما تُمزقها وفياتٌ أبدية. يستغرق الأمر لحظة واحدة ليصبح الموت حقيقةً واقعة، نقطةً واحدةً في خطٍّ زمني، تَطمس كل شيءٍ من الماضي وتَقضي على أي إمكانية للمستقبل."
~
...
هل بكيت خلال قراءة هذا الكتاب الصغير؟
نعم، بكيت كما لم أبك قط-ربما يقترب من تأثري به كتاب الكاتبة السابق.
كتاب حزين ومؤثر وفي عالم مليء بموت الأطفال هذا كتاب عن حزن عائلة وأم بعد خسارة ابن آخر.
لا يمكن تقييم أحزان الآخرين... ولذا لا أجد أيَّّ كلمات أكتبها عن هذا الكتاب، وهذه كانت مقالات مؤثرة وتفطر القلب.
June 7, 2025
Li writes from the depth of the abyss that is both her teenage sons deaths by suicide. She is never sentimental and she is not seeking to answer the questions you might assume she would. She does not flinch as she writes of her profound losses. Her prose is so polished and clean you could chip a tooth on it. The portrait she paints of her sons is tenderly and honestly rendered. This is quite simply one of the most extraordinary pieces of memoir writing I have ever read.
June 12, 2025
“For months the shell that was me continued to live, taking care of my family, teaching, writing, going out on book tours, reporting to jury duty, taking our new puppy to training classes. But my thinking self was outside that shell, watching with indifference. Which of them was me? Which was my twin? The twin who I had once been told existed in the room next door but whom I had never seen. Which was the real me? The one who had always striven to be wise and kind and calm? Or the one who felt a profound indifference to all those efforts. If my children cannot stop me from slipping into unreality, I thought then, looking at the boys who at ten and seven seemed to be living in a moment of great hilarity with endless jokes and laughter. If this will not save me, nothing will, and nothing did.”
June 27, 2025
The right stuff.
I read this in ebook format. And now I gotta purchase the physical copy because it needs to proudly be put on display. This one’s a treasure & the soothing balm that I needed right now.
I read this in ebook format. And now I gotta purchase the physical copy because it needs to proudly be put on display. This one’s a treasure & the soothing balm that I needed right now.
April 7, 2025
What can you say that feels adequate about a memoir that is, at least in part, interrogating the question of what exactly one is able to say in the face of extremity — in Li’s case, the unreal pain of losing both of her young sons to suicide.
I found Li’s recent(ish) novel Where Reasons End to be absolutely stunning, an unbearably sad and beautiful book, and I wondered, when news of this book’s approaching publication came out, how Li would address this unimaginable pain and loss a second time. I’ve never met her, I should say, but she strikes me in her writing as a remarkably vigilant thinker and examiner, and that is very much the impression you get reading Things in Nature Merely Grow. She is also, it’s worth mentioning, capable of looking head-on at extremity in a way that bespeaks a kind of willingness and agility that I envy but do not myself possess. Her insights back from “the abyss,” as she is fond of referring to it, are many, but to say too much about this feels adjacent to spoiling the reading experience: you should hear it in her words, not my synopsis. In that spirit, a passage I found quite lovely:
I found Li’s recent(ish) novel Where Reasons End to be absolutely stunning, an unbearably sad and beautiful book, and I wondered, when news of this book’s approaching publication came out, how Li would address this unimaginable pain and loss a second time. I’ve never met her, I should say, but she strikes me in her writing as a remarkably vigilant thinker and examiner, and that is very much the impression you get reading Things in Nature Merely Grow. She is also, it’s worth mentioning, capable of looking head-on at extremity in a way that bespeaks a kind of willingness and agility that I envy but do not myself possess. Her insights back from “the abyss,” as she is fond of referring to it, are many, but to say too much about this feels adjacent to spoiling the reading experience: you should hear it in her words, not my synopsis. In that spirit, a passage I found quite lovely:
“I did not stop writing or take time off from teaching when Vincent died. Writing, teaching, gardening, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry — all these activities are time-bound, and they do not compete with my children, who are timeless now. There is no rush, as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life. And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word ‘grief,’ which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: 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.
Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual. I don’t want an end point 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. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word? Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.”
May 8, 2025
what a quietly impactful book. yiyun li works through the loss of both of her sons to suicide in such a profound and moving manner. she explores the idea of radical acceptance as a framework for the rest of her life, and the respect that she shows for her sons, their struggles, and their ultimate decisions is so stoic and full of restraint.
i think the restraint is what’s most striking about the book for me. she discusses the way that thinking has always prevailed over feeling for her, similar to her younger son james, and how that has affected the way she processes her loss. to read about someone going through the unimaginable and commit to navigating it in a way that works for them, without kicking and screaming, is awe-inspiring. i’m sure the narrative voice and almost analytical style will garner comparisons to joan didion’s works on grief.
i was also really touched by the way li depicts the relationship between her two sons - how close they were and how the death of her older son must have deeply hurt her younger son. thinking about these losses not only in the context of motherhood, but within the entire family structure, makes it even more heartbreaking.
this was my first time reading yiyun li and i’m definitely interested in checking out her other books now. the way she handled this subject was so strong and impressive.
thank you to fsg and netgalley for the digital arc!
i think the restraint is what’s most striking about the book for me. she discusses the way that thinking has always prevailed over feeling for her, similar to her younger son james, and how that has affected the way she processes her loss. to read about someone going through the unimaginable and commit to navigating it in a way that works for them, without kicking and screaming, is awe-inspiring. i’m sure the narrative voice and almost analytical style will garner comparisons to joan didion’s works on grief.
i was also really touched by the way li depicts the relationship between her two sons - how close they were and how the death of her older son must have deeply hurt her younger son. thinking about these losses not only in the context of motherhood, but within the entire family structure, makes it even more heartbreaking.
this was my first time reading yiyun li and i’m definitely interested in checking out her other books now. the way she handled this subject was so strong and impressive.
thank you to fsg and netgalley for the digital arc!
August 27, 2025
There are very few books (probably only three) which I would call “home” and Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow” is one of them. Reading it was such a deeply intimate experience for me that I often paused and paced the room to gather my thoughts and my emotions, as if embracing a bouquet of not-so-random flowers I picked in a meadow.
Yiyun Li lost two sons - they both took their lives. Vincent was 16 when he died in 2017, James ended his life at the age of 19 in 2024. The author wrote “Where Reasons End” for Vincent but she admits it would be impossible to write a book for James. “Vincent died because he did not feel that life could meet him: in poetry, in music, in beauty, in courage, and in perfection.” But “(…) we could only approximate an understanding of James, not knowing him, not being him.” “A neuropsychologist who did a two-day assessment of James when he was in second grade explained to us that she had run out of tests for his mathematics and his logic.” James never lived among adults who were his intellectual peers.
“Things in Nature Merely Grow” is not a book on grief. It is not an analysis of feelings of a mother (or of parents) who lost both children. It is not what many readers would expect. And yet it was everything I expected, and more. Yiyun Li is an extraordinary woman, the best mother I could ever imagine - respecting her children’s decisions, choices and ways of being at every stage of their lives. She is also a terrific writer, whose perception I identify with very strongly. Her precision, her unique manner of expressing herself fills me with awe. The way she writes about herself gives me the impression she may be the only person in the world to truly understand me.
“And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies.” I find Li’s settling herself into life of permanent presence of absence of her sons somewhat comforting, life-affirming. As a person who considered suicide twice in my life (but never took any steps to end my life), I felt deeply alive and understood while reading “Things in Nature Merely Grow”. I will be forever grateful to Yiyun Li for creating home in her book for me.
Yiyun Li lost two sons - they both took their lives. Vincent was 16 when he died in 2017, James ended his life at the age of 19 in 2024. The author wrote “Where Reasons End” for Vincent but she admits it would be impossible to write a book for James. “Vincent died because he did not feel that life could meet him: in poetry, in music, in beauty, in courage, and in perfection.” But “(…) we could only approximate an understanding of James, not knowing him, not being him.” “A neuropsychologist who did a two-day assessment of James when he was in second grade explained to us that she had run out of tests for his mathematics and his logic.” James never lived among adults who were his intellectual peers.
“Things in Nature Merely Grow” is not a book on grief. It is not an analysis of feelings of a mother (or of parents) who lost both children. It is not what many readers would expect. And yet it was everything I expected, and more. Yiyun Li is an extraordinary woman, the best mother I could ever imagine - respecting her children’s decisions, choices and ways of being at every stage of their lives. She is also a terrific writer, whose perception I identify with very strongly. Her precision, her unique manner of expressing herself fills me with awe. The way she writes about herself gives me the impression she may be the only person in the world to truly understand me.
“And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies.” I find Li’s settling herself into life of permanent presence of absence of her sons somewhat comforting, life-affirming. As a person who considered suicide twice in my life (but never took any steps to end my life), I felt deeply alive and understood while reading “Things in Nature Merely Grow”. I will be forever grateful to Yiyun Li for creating home in her book for me.
May 29, 2025
This book is a touching and beautifully written memoir, in which Yiyun Li details the loss of both of her young sons to suicide.
I cannot begin to imagine the loss but reading this book was much more about how different her children, Vincent (16) and James (19), were and what she attributed their decision to end their lives.
It is a stunning memoir in more ways than one. As I tried to grapple with the idea of putting one foot in front of the other after the deaths I was utterly stunned by the chapter called "Minor Comedies - for James" in which she recounts some of the utterly staggering responses she received from friends, acquaintances, the media and total strangers. They left me open-mouthed at the callousness of some people who feel the need to offer their "wisdom" about her loss.
A beautiful and sensitive memoir that is touching and tender.
Very highly recommended.
I cannot begin to imagine the loss but reading this book was much more about how different her children, Vincent (16) and James (19), were and what she attributed their decision to end their lives.
It is a stunning memoir in more ways than one. As I tried to grapple with the idea of putting one foot in front of the other after the deaths I was utterly stunned by the chapter called "Minor Comedies - for James" in which she recounts some of the utterly staggering responses she received from friends, acquaintances, the media and total strangers. They left me open-mouthed at the callousness of some people who feel the need to offer their "wisdom" about her loss.
A beautiful and sensitive memoir that is touching and tender.
Very highly recommended.
September 7, 2025
There's no way to soften what follows. Yiyun Li is a professor at Princeton and lost her two children to suicide (2018, 2024). And there's no softening this book either. "Things in Nature Merely Grow" (2025) is first and foremost a book about loss. Not sentimental loss, there's no room for redemption here. It is loss as the dissolution of the narrative, as a radical gesture of remaining in the abyss. Yiyun Li doesn't write to console or explain. She writes to remain lucid where most of us would fall apart.
Li presents a profoundly analysed book about what it means to be alive, about what suicide means, about accepting life as it is handed to us, without adornment, without promises, without imposed meaning.
I accepted that pact. I went into the book knowing what I was getting into, or thinking I knew. I told myself that I would follow that lucidity to the end, even though I knew it wouldn't be comfortable. But as the book progressed, especially in the second half when Yiyun Li dwells on her relationship with her children, I slowly sank in. It wasn't the account of the deaths that touched me most, it was the way she goes through them with an almost inhuman clarity, stripped of ornamentation, without a trace of emotional appeal. Her lucidity was too much. I let myself go, page by page, into a sadness that wasn't hers alone, but was mixed with my own worries, with my questions as a father, as a man who is also looking for structures where perhaps only the flow exists.
Towards the end, I found a photograph of the children on their father's lap. They were both smiling, their faces open to the camera, their lives still whole. And at that moment I almost cried. Not out of pity, but out of amazement. Because there, in that fragment rescued from time, it was still possible to believe that love was enough, that a lap protected, that the world had ground. Then I went back to the book and read the final paragraphs, where Yiyun Li describes a pencil broken at the moment of death, a rucksack returned, a phone with a fracture. "These are facts, too," she says. And it's these facts that she anchors herself in, because everything else — hope, narrative, meaning — no longer serves her.
I closed the book with a heavy weight on me. I don't regret reading it, but I wouldn't go back any time soon. This isn't a book you recommend, it's a book you witness. And perhaps only those who are willing to give up consolation will be able to fully inhabit it. I went as far as I could. And I came back, not with answers, but with the certainty that there are forms of love and lucidity that surpass us. "Things in Nature Merely Grow" is one of those extreme gestures: it doesn't hold our hand, but shows us that it's possible to keep standing, even when all seems lost.
Li presents a profoundly analysed book about what it means to be alive, about what suicide means, about accepting life as it is handed to us, without adornment, without promises, without imposed meaning.
I accepted that pact. I went into the book knowing what I was getting into, or thinking I knew. I told myself that I would follow that lucidity to the end, even though I knew it wouldn't be comfortable. But as the book progressed, especially in the second half when Yiyun Li dwells on her relationship with her children, I slowly sank in. It wasn't the account of the deaths that touched me most, it was the way she goes through them with an almost inhuman clarity, stripped of ornamentation, without a trace of emotional appeal. Her lucidity was too much. I let myself go, page by page, into a sadness that wasn't hers alone, but was mixed with my own worries, with my questions as a father, as a man who is also looking for structures where perhaps only the flow exists.
Towards the end, I found a photograph of the children on their father's lap. They were both smiling, their faces open to the camera, their lives still whole. And at that moment I almost cried. Not out of pity, but out of amazement. Because there, in that fragment rescued from time, it was still possible to believe that love was enough, that a lap protected, that the world had ground. Then I went back to the book and read the final paragraphs, where Yiyun Li describes a pencil broken at the moment of death, a rucksack returned, a phone with a fracture. "These are facts, too," she says. And it's these facts that she anchors herself in, because everything else — hope, narrative, meaning — no longer serves her.
I closed the book with a heavy weight on me. I don't regret reading it, but I wouldn't go back any time soon. This isn't a book you recommend, it's a book you witness. And perhaps only those who are willing to give up consolation will be able to fully inhabit it. I went as far as I could. And I came back, not with answers, but with the certainty that there are forms of love and lucidity that surpass us. "Things in Nature Merely Grow" is one of those extreme gestures: it doesn't hold our hand, but shows us that it's possible to keep standing, even when all seems lost.
June 7, 2025
I wanted to love this so very much, but I couldn't. Most significantly, I didn't like Li's depiction of her younger son. She doesn't admit that he's autistic, but she quotes sources (e.g., Born on a Blue Day) that strongly imply that he was-- or at least that he believed he was. With that backdrop, the distinctions she painstakingly drew between that "thinking" son and her "feeling" son, who she felt much closer to and understood better, were excruciating for me. I have zero grounds for judging this mother's relationship with her child (and wouldn't want to do so anyway), but the whole thing just made me feel awful.
There are also some breathtakingly bitter passages where she calls out former friends and others for reacting badly or inadequately to her grief, and I found those hard to read. Some of the people she's quoting to shame them were almost certainly trying their best but just not sure what to do in the face of almost unbelievable tragedy. Li can be somewhat bitingly funny about these people's failures, but again, the whole thing just made me feel bad in a way that was not quite what she intended.
There are also some breathtakingly bitter passages where she calls out former friends and others for reacting badly or inadequately to her grief, and I found those hard to read. Some of the people she's quoting to shame them were almost certainly trying their best but just not sure what to do in the face of almost unbelievable tragedy. Li can be somewhat bitingly funny about these people's failures, but again, the whole thing just made me feel bad in a way that was not quite what she intended.
January 25, 2025
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li is an intimate book where the author shares her radical acceptance of the loss of her son James to suicide. The honesty and interiority is at the forefront and the writing as all I’ve read from this author before is stand out. This monument to her son is everlasting and the care is evident.
Thank you to FSG Books via NetGalley for my ARC!
Thank you to FSG Books via NetGalley for my ARC!
June 20, 2025
In Camus' play Caligula, the emperor says, "Men die; and they are not happy." It's an enigmatically terse sentence. "Half the line is fact, the other half conjecture," Yiyun Li writes in this memoir. There is no clear cause and effect, no overt logical connection between the two clauses, just a simple conjunction with a semicolon. Are men unhappy because they die? Do men die because or when or although they are unhappy? It's a gnomic sentence that is baffling and cryptic. One might also note here that Caligula's words reject the ancient maxim of the law-giver Solon ("no man can be called happy until dead" because only at the moment of death can someone be sure that they have achieved a virtuous end and can therefore be certain of their happiness). Does death cancel out the possibility of happiness? Is Caligula repudiating the idea of virtue and happiness altogether in the face of the ineluctable reality of death? Caligula debases the noble paradox that "men are only happy at death" to the bleaker, "men die; and they are unhappy." Caligula's words become a refrain throughout Li's essay memoir: "Children die; and they are not happy"; "Children die; and their parents go on living"; "Children die; and their dog goes on living". There are no ornamental adverbs, no excess adjectives, no subordination—just basic parataxis.
Yiyun Li's two sons died by suicide. Her first son, Vincent, died at sixteen; her second son, James, died at nineteen. Both times the detective prefaced the news with the statement, "There's no easy way to say this." It's a cliché, Li admits, but it's the truth. There is no good way to say that her sons are dead. This book, written in the months after James' death, is not about her sons' death. It's about the fact that her sons are dead; and she is alive. It's about the struggle to put it all into words, avoiding the well-worn clichés about time curing everything, the tawdry platitudes about the stages of grief, the comforting euphemisms (Chinese readers rebuke her for so callously using the word "die"), and the banal consolations of religion ("it was his time to go" or "God giveth and taketh away"). It's about the failure of language after such indescribable loss: is a mother of two dead children still a mother? Is she a parent who can no longer parent? Is her dog Quintus (so-named because he was the fifth addition to the family, after her sons) still Quintus? Words fail when the fixtures of her reality fall. Nothing makes sense. After she texted her friends to tell them about James' death, they were stunned ("I knew what every one of those words meant but I didn't understand what those words meant, put together," one of her friends said). Words become senseless. Years earlier, when she told James about Vincent's suicide, he too was reduced to monosyllabic anguish, asking his mother, "Why cry you?" a sentence both babyish in its simplicity and Shakespearean in its syntax. Incomprehensible suffering requires a new grammar.
James is a mystery in this book. When she told him she had been reading Caligula and was moved by the line "Men die; and they are not happy," he simply replied, "It's quite compelling." When she told him that she was reading Wittgenstein's Logico-Philosophicus, a favorite of his, he simply said "oh" with an inscrutable smile. Li could understand her first son, Vincent, a voluble boy of emotional highs and uninhibited expression, who stood out at school in his hot-pink dress. James, however, was always more reserved—a precocious philosopher, mathematician, thinker, prone more to thinking than feeling, a wunderkind who read physics and anatomy books at age 5 and who had no interest in recognition or status. He was more of a Bartleby who would often answer, "I would prefer not to", declining to answer questions or to have his photograph taken. While both sons died by suicide at New Jersey train junctions, their deaths were not the same. Vincent died because he could not bear his deep and intense feelings; James died from thinking. Vincent found life unlivable; James found life livable but concluded that a livable life "was not what he wanted."
In the preface to his Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein wrote (and Li quotes) that "This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its objects would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure." Wittgenstein's preface is also a manifesto for Li's writerly struggle: Wittgenstein is the philosopher not just of language but of the hard limits of language, and James, the enigmatically reticent son, inhabiting his own private realm of thoughts, is a mystery ("if he did not understand something, he could not possibly speak; if he understood something thoroughly, there was no point in speaking"—James is like some incarnation of Wittgenstein's dictum, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent".) Li's book is about these deficiencies of language—what words cannot really convey to those who have never experienced what she has experienced and who have never examined themselves with the same unwavering self-examination as her.
When the gods killed her twelve sons and daughters, Niobe was immediately immobilized by grief and transformed into a mute statue. But for Li, who compares her loss to the premise of a Greek tragedy, the death of her children forces her to return to the hard labor of thinking and writing, finding comfort in literature and scrutinizing her experiences—not for easy answers but for radical acceptance—confronting, and refusing to be calcified by, pain. Words fail but she has to inspect her reality and her mind with careful attention. At the start of the book, she turns to her memories of Camus' Caligula but by the end, she takes issue with Camus. "Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection," he writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. But as Li thinks about it, she and her sons contemplated suicide with thorough reflection. James, who died on a Friday afternoon after his last class that week, "walked out of life as though that was the natural conclusion to the week." Camus also wrote famously, "whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy" but as Li explains, if she had been asked, in the middle of her suicidal depression, if life was worth living, she would have said yes. Men die, even though their lives are worth living. Men die, even though, and maybe because, they think. It's a gentle rejoinder to Camus' absurdist philosophy. Her pain makes her return to literature and to think and reject what she has read.
And yet, finishing the book, I'm left wondering if the retreat into philosophy is its own kind of psychic distraction and sublimation. We learn a lot about Vincent and James (and we have no right to learn more) but Li always want to zoom out to questions of language and literature. She turns her critical gaze to her life but her focus is always on the abstract. Her memoir makes me wonder about the personal rather than the philosophical. She herself struggled with depression and is still reckoning with her mother's abusive parenting, her first son with his pink dress was clearly pushing against the codes of traditional masculinity, and her second son had surpassed all the intelligence tests and had no friends outside his family. Li mentions all these things but immediately swerves back to cerebral questions about existence and meaning. She is a cold writer but somehow I felt that her self-exegesis and theorizing was its own kind of literary obfuscation.
Yiyun Li's two sons died by suicide. Her first son, Vincent, died at sixteen; her second son, James, died at nineteen. Both times the detective prefaced the news with the statement, "There's no easy way to say this." It's a cliché, Li admits, but it's the truth. There is no good way to say that her sons are dead. This book, written in the months after James' death, is not about her sons' death. It's about the fact that her sons are dead; and she is alive. It's about the struggle to put it all into words, avoiding the well-worn clichés about time curing everything, the tawdry platitudes about the stages of grief, the comforting euphemisms (Chinese readers rebuke her for so callously using the word "die"), and the banal consolations of religion ("it was his time to go" or "God giveth and taketh away"). It's about the failure of language after such indescribable loss: is a mother of two dead children still a mother? Is she a parent who can no longer parent? Is her dog Quintus (so-named because he was the fifth addition to the family, after her sons) still Quintus? Words fail when the fixtures of her reality fall. Nothing makes sense. After she texted her friends to tell them about James' death, they were stunned ("I knew what every one of those words meant but I didn't understand what those words meant, put together," one of her friends said). Words become senseless. Years earlier, when she told James about Vincent's suicide, he too was reduced to monosyllabic anguish, asking his mother, "Why cry you?" a sentence both babyish in its simplicity and Shakespearean in its syntax. Incomprehensible suffering requires a new grammar.
James is a mystery in this book. When she told him she had been reading Caligula and was moved by the line "Men die; and they are not happy," he simply replied, "It's quite compelling." When she told him that she was reading Wittgenstein's Logico-Philosophicus, a favorite of his, he simply said "oh" with an inscrutable smile. Li could understand her first son, Vincent, a voluble boy of emotional highs and uninhibited expression, who stood out at school in his hot-pink dress. James, however, was always more reserved—a precocious philosopher, mathematician, thinker, prone more to thinking than feeling, a wunderkind who read physics and anatomy books at age 5 and who had no interest in recognition or status. He was more of a Bartleby who would often answer, "I would prefer not to", declining to answer questions or to have his photograph taken. While both sons died by suicide at New Jersey train junctions, their deaths were not the same. Vincent died because he could not bear his deep and intense feelings; James died from thinking. Vincent found life unlivable; James found life livable but concluded that a livable life "was not what he wanted."
In the preface to his Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein wrote (and Li quotes) that "This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its objects would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure." Wittgenstein's preface is also a manifesto for Li's writerly struggle: Wittgenstein is the philosopher not just of language but of the hard limits of language, and James, the enigmatically reticent son, inhabiting his own private realm of thoughts, is a mystery ("if he did not understand something, he could not possibly speak; if he understood something thoroughly, there was no point in speaking"—James is like some incarnation of Wittgenstein's dictum, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent".) Li's book is about these deficiencies of language—what words cannot really convey to those who have never experienced what she has experienced and who have never examined themselves with the same unwavering self-examination as her.
When the gods killed her twelve sons and daughters, Niobe was immediately immobilized by grief and transformed into a mute statue. But for Li, who compares her loss to the premise of a Greek tragedy, the death of her children forces her to return to the hard labor of thinking and writing, finding comfort in literature and scrutinizing her experiences—not for easy answers but for radical acceptance—confronting, and refusing to be calcified by, pain. Words fail but she has to inspect her reality and her mind with careful attention. At the start of the book, she turns to her memories of Camus' Caligula but by the end, she takes issue with Camus. "Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection," he writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. But as Li thinks about it, she and her sons contemplated suicide with thorough reflection. James, who died on a Friday afternoon after his last class that week, "walked out of life as though that was the natural conclusion to the week." Camus also wrote famously, "whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy" but as Li explains, if she had been asked, in the middle of her suicidal depression, if life was worth living, she would have said yes. Men die, even though their lives are worth living. Men die, even though, and maybe because, they think. It's a gentle rejoinder to Camus' absurdist philosophy. Her pain makes her return to literature and to think and reject what she has read.
And yet, finishing the book, I'm left wondering if the retreat into philosophy is its own kind of psychic distraction and sublimation. We learn a lot about Vincent and James (and we have no right to learn more) but Li always want to zoom out to questions of language and literature. She turns her critical gaze to her life but her focus is always on the abstract. Her memoir makes me wonder about the personal rather than the philosophical. She herself struggled with depression and is still reckoning with her mother's abusive parenting, her first son with his pink dress was clearly pushing against the codes of traditional masculinity, and her second son had surpassed all the intelligence tests and had no friends outside his family. Li mentions all these things but immediately swerves back to cerebral questions about existence and meaning. She is a cold writer but somehow I felt that her self-exegesis and theorizing was its own kind of literary obfuscation.
July 25, 2025
I was horrified and heartbroken to learn, in reviews upon release of this book, that renowned novelist Yiyun Li had lost first one son, then, a few years later, her remaining son, to suicide. I think parents face few things more cruel and difficult than the death of a child to suicide, but two? I was compelled to read what she had to say. This was not at all what I expected. She examines virtually everything very closely in this account, but as she herself admits, she prefers to approach the world by thinking rather than feeling. One never doubts that she feels intensely, but she describes everything at an intellectual remove, in such austere language. It was a beautiful tribute to her son (she wrote a different book, a novel, for her first son after his death), and her reserve somehow made it even more moving than if she’d spilled her guts all over the page.
P.S. I keep thinking about this book, and it occurs to me that I neglected to mention an important thing about it, so I’m going back in to edit my review to take care of that. This is most definitely not one of those inspirational memoirs in which a terrible thing is survived and then all involved find a way to cope with it and come out the other side with some newfound strength and wisdom. Do not read this if you’re seeking that kind of redemptive arc because you will be disappointed. Children sometimes die and the parents go on living, as Ms. Li says often in the book, but pain is constant.
P.S. I keep thinking about this book, and it occurs to me that I neglected to mention an important thing about it, so I’m going back in to edit my review to take care of that. This is most definitely not one of those inspirational memoirs in which a terrible thing is survived and then all involved find a way to cope with it and come out the other side with some newfound strength and wisdom. Do not read this if you’re seeking that kind of redemptive arc because you will be disappointed. Children sometimes die and the parents go on living, as Ms. Li says often in the book, but pain is constant.
August 30, 2025
3.5 rounded up to 4 stars. The author’s two sons died by suicide: Vincent at sixteen, and James at nineteen – seven years, four months, and nineteen days apart. And yet, as many have said, the book isn’t really about their deaths. It’s about what it means to go on living when they are no longer here.
Li writes not in a sentimental way but with clear, spare, and strikingly beautiful prose – intellectual, sometimes austere, but always honest. She doesn’t wallow in emotion, and somehow that makes her reflections feel even more powerful.
Knowing that she herself has struggled with depression and once attempted suicide, I couldn’t help but wonder how much that shaped the way she faces this loss. Does it give her a kind of understanding that eases the weight a little, or does it make it all the harder because she remains while they are gone?
A thought-provoking read that lingers long after you close the book.
Li writes not in a sentimental way but with clear, spare, and strikingly beautiful prose – intellectual, sometimes austere, but always honest. She doesn’t wallow in emotion, and somehow that makes her reflections feel even more powerful.
Knowing that she herself has struggled with depression and once attempted suicide, I couldn’t help but wonder how much that shaped the way she faces this loss. Does it give her a kind of understanding that eases the weight a little, or does it make it all the harder because she remains while they are gone?
A thought-provoking read that lingers long after you close the book.
“One cannot drop time as one cannot drop a baby; one simply has to carry on.”
August 1, 2025
devastating, beautiful, and an indirect answer to questions i have about motherhood as someone with a mental illness
July 14, 2025
An extraordinary memoir on the devastating loss of both her sons to suicide. She writes so clearly on her boys, their personalities and the impact of their time with and without them, the impact of those around them, the impact on her life.
Don’t be put off reading this, Li has written something you’ll think now and now and now and now.
Don’t be put off reading this, Li has written something you’ll think now and now and now and now.
May 22, 2025
Li, Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, presents her memoir about her second son, James, and his death in 2024 at the age of nineteen. She honors James and his suicide by framing Things in Nature Merely Grow as an intellectually driven project, patterned after James’s natural disposition for logic and philosophy. The book does not grieve or mourn James’s decision, for Li finds grieving and mourning unsatisfactory vehicles to transport readers to the black hole inside her. Nor will she adorn the writing with extraneous adverbs, a stylistic choice she and James find philosophically unpleasant.
Instead, Li practices “radical acceptance.” She recognizes her loving efforts and inability to keep James alive, and she respects his decision to stop living. Knowing her reserved son’s volition, she conjectures he conscientiously considered existential questions about life, his instance of living, and the choice not to live: “Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living[.]. . . However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn’t always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it.” Through hypothetically recreating James’s private, internal thought process, her radical acceptance showcases an unnatural, as it were, response to losing James to suicide six years and four months after her first son, Vincent, to suicide as well. In memorializing James, Li continuously addresses Camus’s philosophical question: Is life worth living? James’s answer, in the wake of losing his older brother, leaves Li in an abyss.
In this life, the author will always—“every single day, for the rest of [her] . . . life”—reside in her new habitat, the abyss, which is sustained by writing. Remarkably lucid, Li writes about her intuition as a mother, her splintered relationship with her irascible and abusive mother, her mental health journey, and her distinct way of processing her two unique sons’ deaths. Also quite remarkably, Li shares how strangers, acquaintances, and the media (in America and China) responds to the events. It shocks me that we offer condolences with such little tact and care, and it frustrates me to watch the media scrutinize Li. In response, Li continues to live and work. She believes, “it is my job to tell them [her students] that sometimes poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks.” As natural as it was for James to grow until he “walked out of life as though that was the natural conclusion of the week,” so this parent continues living when her children die before their time.
My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC.
Instead, Li practices “radical acceptance.” She recognizes her loving efforts and inability to keep James alive, and she respects his decision to stop living. Knowing her reserved son’s volition, she conjectures he conscientiously considered existential questions about life, his instance of living, and the choice not to live: “Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living[.]. . . However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn’t always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it.” Through hypothetically recreating James’s private, internal thought process, her radical acceptance showcases an unnatural, as it were, response to losing James to suicide six years and four months after her first son, Vincent, to suicide as well. In memorializing James, Li continuously addresses Camus’s philosophical question: Is life worth living? James’s answer, in the wake of losing his older brother, leaves Li in an abyss.
In this life, the author will always—“every single day, for the rest of [her] . . . life”—reside in her new habitat, the abyss, which is sustained by writing. Remarkably lucid, Li writes about her intuition as a mother, her splintered relationship with her irascible and abusive mother, her mental health journey, and her distinct way of processing her two unique sons’ deaths. Also quite remarkably, Li shares how strangers, acquaintances, and the media (in America and China) responds to the events. It shocks me that we offer condolences with such little tact and care, and it frustrates me to watch the media scrutinize Li. In response, Li continues to live and work. She believes, “it is my job to tell them [her students] that sometimes poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks.” As natural as it was for James to grow until he “walked out of life as though that was the natural conclusion of the week,” so this parent continues living when her children die before their time.
My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC.
July 30, 2025
4.5
I loved this. This is the kind of nonfiction writing that turns me into a reader of nonfiction. Li’s prose here is measured, precise, quietly fierce and visceral.
The book is, in a way, a retaliation against ‘grief’ as the dominant idea that frames for people what life is in the aftermath of catastrophic loss. And the fact that some people, having just read it themselves, are still describing it as a ‘grief memoir’, is evidence of that. It’s like, did they really read it?!
It’s about the “abyss” that Li lives in, and her commitment to a life of “marking time”, and of “living by thinking”, as her son James did, as opposed to feeling. She has chosen to be calm and logical, knowing all the while that the language she’ll be thinking in is old, and “imperfect and ineffective”, and that she’ll fail. This book is the product of her living in this way, and what she’s been able to do in it is amazing.
It’s an astonishing memoir, and its value is incalculable. Personally, I live with the knowledge that I’m very possibly living the breeziest and happiest years of my life now. I’m not yet living with the death of someone very close to me. One day, or one of *these* days—we never know the moment—one of, and then both of, my loved ones will die, and I’ll likely enter some kind of abyss. (I can’t help it, my mind dwells on this bleak but real shit). Li has accepted the abyss and thinks of it as her permanent habitat, the realm in which she’ll live the rest of her life. The way she writes about this, and about her boys, her son Victor and her son James, is pretty breathtaking.
An exquisite book, philosophical and intelligent, and a highlight of my year.
I loved this. This is the kind of nonfiction writing that turns me into a reader of nonfiction. Li’s prose here is measured, precise, quietly fierce and visceral.
The book is, in a way, a retaliation against ‘grief’ as the dominant idea that frames for people what life is in the aftermath of catastrophic loss. And the fact that some people, having just read it themselves, are still describing it as a ‘grief memoir’, is evidence of that. It’s like, did they really read it?!
It’s about the “abyss” that Li lives in, and her commitment to a life of “marking time”, and of “living by thinking”, as her son James did, as opposed to feeling. She has chosen to be calm and logical, knowing all the while that the language she’ll be thinking in is old, and “imperfect and ineffective”, and that she’ll fail. This book is the product of her living in this way, and what she’s been able to do in it is amazing.
It’s an astonishing memoir, and its value is incalculable. Personally, I live with the knowledge that I’m very possibly living the breeziest and happiest years of my life now. I’m not yet living with the death of someone very close to me. One day, or one of *these* days—we never know the moment—one of, and then both of, my loved ones will die, and I’ll likely enter some kind of abyss. (I can’t help it, my mind dwells on this bleak but real shit). Li has accepted the abyss and thinks of it as her permanent habitat, the realm in which she’ll live the rest of her life. The way she writes about this, and about her boys, her son Victor and her son James, is pretty breathtaking.
An exquisite book, philosophical and intelligent, and a highlight of my year.
July 27, 2025
This is a book so good that I'm hesitant to start another after it.
What makes this book--already promised to be tragic--all the more tragic, all the more moving, is the simultaneous depth and necessary distance at which Li understands both of her sons. I felt her throughout as a mother, as a daughter, as a wife... but perhaps most clearly as a woman who grasps the beauty and limits of understanding. Who is Vincent? Who is James? Who are they together, who are they separately, who are they to her, to the world? How did she know them, and how did she (mis)understand them? She does an extraordinary job of balancing understanding with confusion, tragedy with logic, history with present.
As she often writes, if "Where Reasons End" was about feeling, this is a book about thinking. And few books have made me think, or inspired me to write, as much as this one has.
What makes this book--already promised to be tragic--all the more tragic, all the more moving, is the simultaneous depth and necessary distance at which Li understands both of her sons. I felt her throughout as a mother, as a daughter, as a wife... but perhaps most clearly as a woman who grasps the beauty and limits of understanding. Who is Vincent? Who is James? Who are they together, who are they separately, who are they to her, to the world? How did she know them, and how did she (mis)understand them? She does an extraordinary job of balancing understanding with confusion, tragedy with logic, history with present.
As she often writes, if "Where Reasons End" was about feeling, this is a book about thinking. And few books have made me think, or inspired me to write, as much as this one has.
June 7, 2025
I have been on something of a grief literature kick lately, and I would say that this was a good read, but also an incredibly strange one. I don’t know how to rate this book, as I’m still sitting with it, but I’m struck with how little I can relate to the outlook of our narrator/author.
I am not a parent, though I would like to be, but I do deal with mental health struggles. I don’t mean to blame or critique our author, but I can scarcely imagine being asked be my child “the world is full of suffering, why did you bring me into it?” and not immediately making an effort to illustrate the beauty of the world. I cannot imagine telling my child that only a meager 10% of life is good, and that life does not get better, only our ability to deal with it. If anything, this book has made me more aware of the way our own outlook on the world can imprint on our children.
Grief can be an alienating process, but I found myself having trouble relating to our author more than anything. A beautiful, difficult, and sadly timeless book, but one I’m not sure how to feel about.
I am not a parent, though I would like to be, but I do deal with mental health struggles. I don’t mean to blame or critique our author, but I can scarcely imagine being asked be my child “the world is full of suffering, why did you bring me into it?” and not immediately making an effort to illustrate the beauty of the world. I cannot imagine telling my child that only a meager 10% of life is good, and that life does not get better, only our ability to deal with it. If anything, this book has made me more aware of the way our own outlook on the world can imprint on our children.
Grief can be an alienating process, but I found myself having trouble relating to our author more than anything. A beautiful, difficult, and sadly timeless book, but one I’m not sure how to feel about.
June 18, 2025
Every morning at seven I sit on the train heading for the suburbs. With noise-cancelling headphones on, my right elbow braced against the window, I watch the rain-washed winter fields slide by. The carriage is warm with the heater running, and somewhere between the turning pages I reach the end of an essay—and burst into tears.
They are gone. So their mother begins to read the books they once read, to revisit the conversations she had with them, to share the instincts only a mother can feel. She keeps up the piano lessons, the swimming classes—if only in memory. Out in the garden she tells herself: this year I can plant poppies; next year, lilies and roses. Plants will struggle upward with all their strength. When she fingers their clothing and slips those garments back onto herself, their clothes become clothes forever—no one can stamp a date on the time of the dead. Like a snail she carries the heavy burden of everything and begins again, because the sun still rises, and things in nature merely grow.
They are gone. So their mother begins to read the books they once read, to revisit the conversations she had with them, to share the instincts only a mother can feel. She keeps up the piano lessons, the swimming classes—if only in memory. Out in the garden she tells herself: this year I can plant poppies; next year, lilies and roses. Plants will struggle upward with all their strength. When she fingers their clothing and slips those garments back onto herself, their clothes become clothes forever—no one can stamp a date on the time of the dead. Like a snail she carries the heavy burden of everything and begins again, because the sun still rises, and things in nature merely grow.
August 6, 2025
I loved how much the author was able to explain what made her children unique. I also loved her ability to explain how she has lived with grief. I love how she was able to explain how much her children’s short lives mattered. I love how much agency she allows assigned, and continues to assign, to her children, something parents don’t always do.
June 9, 2025
“words fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable”
an exploration of feeling/thinking, life/death, living/grieving that i could read again and again and again
an exploration of feeling/thinking, life/death, living/grieving that i could read again and again and again
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August 23, 2025this book rendered me utterly speechless - yiyun li is surely one of our greatest living writers
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