Yiyun Li’s Latest Memoir Illuminates My Responsibilities and Limitations as a Parent

Early in Yiyun Li’s latest memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, she writes of parenthood: “There are many ways for things to go wrong, and yet one’s hope, always, is that somehow they will turn out all right in the end.” That combination of “blind courage” and “wishful thinking” are prerequisites for any parent, and in many cases they’re enough. “A mother cannot sit in front of her child’s bedroom all night long,” she argues. “A mother cannot follow a child’s every step of life, just so that she can make sure he remains alive.”
Any parent, no matter how helicoptery or anxious, would be hard-pressed to disagree. In Li’s case, however, a dreadful fact lurks beneath the truism: her two sons died by suicide as teenagers, six years apart. She has written previously about the death of her older son, Vincent—Li is an esteemed professor and prolific author of both memoir and fiction—but this book, drafted in the aftermath of James’s suicide, resounds with the absence of both her children and reckons with her status as a mother “who can no longer mother”.
“A mother’s care…is essential to the order of things, insubstantial in the scale of things…. That a mother can do all things humanly possible for her children and yet cannot keep them alive—this is a fact that eschews any adjective. Children die, and parents go on living—this, too, is a fact that defies all adjectives.”
Though she avoids the word “grief,” its grammar is of great interest to Li, an economical writer whittled to austerity by these successive tragedies. Things in Nature Merely Grow is slim, spare, and almost devoid of emotion, more philosophical treatise than moving tale of a mother in mourning. This makes it difficult for the reader to connect with her experience, but Li’s pursuit of radical acceptance may necessitate her intellectual remove. “My students are often dumbfounded: they are still young, but it is my job to tell them that sometimes poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks. It’s their good fortune that they haven’t learned that sometimes people don’t have the luxury to wallow in clichés.”
Li is not much of a wallower regardless. She writes that the book is “written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.” She knows it’s Sisyphean to climb back out, and so doesn’t even make an attempt. Instead, she picks back up her piano lessons, resumes writing, and settles into the weary rhythm of her new existence. “If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life,” Li declares, “the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.”
~~~

You might wonder how much of a masochist I must be to plunge into Li’s abyss alongside her. Doubly so, since I am both the mother of young children and the daughter of a man who died by suicide—which makes their odds of suicide greater as a result. My 11-year-old son is also trans, which confers its own harrowing statistics around self-harm. I hesitated to read Things in Nature Merely Grow even as it pulled me in like a black hole: stories of suicide, and stories of losing a child, threaten to puncture the armor I've fashioned to make it through each day. But, once in a while, I am compelled to look. If we don’t understand profound vulnerability, we can’t access profound love. In the absence of that, what is life for?
Despite my own past descents into depression, my periodic panic attacks and unrelenting (though well-medicated) anxiety, the thought of suicide has never intruded on my consciousness. As I told my therapist early in our relationship, “The only scenario in which I could conceive of wanting to kill myself would be if both my children died.” Until encountering Li’s heartrending narrative, my imagination had only stretched as far as a car accident or plane crash—now the notion of losing them in successive suicides haunts me, when I let it.
This is why I insist on giving them the concepts and language to discuss their inner lives, however turbulent. It’s been my approach from the beginning, along with being open and honest in an age-appropriate way about their grandpa’s suicide despite the pervasive stigma.
In the spring of 2021, my newly vaccinated mom was coming to visit for the first time in months. While my husband and I raced to tidy up the house, E. and S., then seven and four, were absorbed in a Zoom art class; we listened in from the kitchen.
“Would anyone like to tell us about their drawing?”
E. unmuted. “I drew a picture of Gaga, my grandma. She’s on her way here, and I’m so excited!”
“That’s great. Will you hold your paper up so everyone can see?”
His paper fluttered as he tried to angle it just right.
“What a beautiful drawing! Is it just your grandma or is anyone else coming with her?”
“Not our grandpa!” S. chimed in, her little voice still rounded by a toddler’s soft sounds.
“Oh, why not?”
E. cut in. “Because he’s dead. He killed himself.”
I raced toward them as time turned to Jell-o.
“Before we were born.” S. added.
The teacher’s face froze. “Um…. I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be really sad.” Her eyes searched the mosaic of boxes for help, just as I reached the laptop.
“Yes, it is.” I hit mute and slammed the screen shut.
I sat next to E. on a burnt-orange chair. “Remember when I told you about my dad’s suicide?”
“Yes, Mama. I was really sad for you.”
“Me too,” S. chimed in.
“I said then and I’ll say it now: it’s okay to tell people your grandpa died before you were born. But it’s better not to share how he died. Lots of parents don’t talk about suicide with their kids, so they might be confused or afraid. We talk about it because we don’t keep secrets in our family. You two can never think or feel or do something scary or bad enough to make us stop loving you. You can always come to me and Papa. You know that, right?”
“Right, Mama. But what should I say if someone asks me how he died?” E. was a step ahead of me, as usual.
“Maybe just that…his brain stopped working?”
“It must have stopped working if it told him not to keep living, right?”
“Right.” I left it there. It’s a fine line between being instructive and forthright with my children about dark or controversial matters—like sex, politics, and their grandpa’s suicide—and leaving them susceptible to society’s penchant for shaming in a way that’s unfair to their guilelessness. So much of parenting boils down to this tricky balance between preparing our children for the world and protecting them from it.
~~~

Parents who lose their children, Li writes, “either live or follow their children down to Hades”. The ones who live do so “because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths...Dying is hard. Living is harder.”
In its own context, living was certainly harder for my dad.
October 13th, 2010. Five weeks after his 65th birthday had passed unacknowledged. More than a year since he’d spoken to me. His partner had left him in May. Ever since, he’d been trying over and over to make the numbers work: Two underwater houses (his own and his mother’s) with mortgages in arrears and an IRS lien. A hundred grand in credit-card debt. Sixty grand stuck in his IRA. A checking account balance in the triple digits.
He still had his black BMW 3-Series, though the lease had expired, and a case of his favorite Rioja, Marqués de Riscal. He could see only one way out.
He lit some kindling in the stone fireplace. Opened a bottle. Tended the fire. Wrote in his journal. Opened another and polished it off, then walked down the leaf-strewn back steps to his detached garage. He got in the car, closed the garage door, and turned the engine on. I like to think he played “The Very Best of the Everly Brothers”—his favorite—one last time.
“The irony,” he wrote in his journal, “of a Jew being gassed in a German-made car.”
At 27, I was left to live without him—and with this legacy.
I’ve pieced this narrative together from fragments, clues. But I know him almost like I know myself. The rationale, the response, it all makes sense to me. Like the suicides of Vincent and James make sense to Li.
Of course, any insight I offer here derives from inference and projection, not the marrow-sticking pain of lived experience. Our situations are an inversion: I lost my parent; she lost her children. The onus was not on me to keep my dad alive—but that is the most fundamental responsibility I have to my children. The drive to ensure the survival of our offspring (and of the species) is encoded in our DNA and manifested in the deepest, most reptilian quarters of our brains. How gut-wrenching it must be to feel like you’ve failed at this evolutionary mandate.
I don’t wonder whether I could have, should have, done more to stop him, not that I knew it was in the offing. Those questions are impossible for either of us to answer because, as Li puts it, “on this side of death no answer can be trusted.” It was also his life to end.
Li views her sons’ suicides in a similar vein. “It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children—so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self—was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.”
That perspective, controversial as it is in a culture which places primacy on happy endings, may be necessary in retrospect. I agree, in part. Besides, I’m not here to judge. I lost my father, yes; but I have my children—both of them. I can still mother as a verb. To the end of my days, I hope.
An essential aspect of that mothering involves the first part of Li’s sentiment: that we should honor our children’s peculiarities so that they can grow to be their own individuals. I couldn’t endorse that more. Our children are not carbon copies of us; they exist outside our experience. No one has argued this more eloquently than Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree, in which he writes, “In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.”
In order to prop up those fantasies, adults often discount children’s self-awareness and identity formation. This comes into play when parents refuse to relinquish control over decisions as mundane as what their children eat, wear, and read—and even more insidiously when adults deny children the right to assert their gender identity.
Today’s toxic climate offers countless examples of this diminishment, as adults from the White House and Elon Musk to local school boards and sports leagues deny the self-determination of trans and nonbinary kids and teens out of fear. They worry about what will happen if children are allowed to develop and grow without the pressure of their parents’ thumbs forcing them into the desired shape. This is far from a new concern in our culture: from the Fifth Commandment to Locke’s “blank slate” or even the lengths to which the Wormwoods go to quash precocious Matilda’s curiosity, the dominant narrative is that children do not, or should not, have agency. From fascists on down to patriarchs, parents, it’s all about control.
Developmental psychologists Leon Kuczynski and Jan de Mol take issue with the notion that the role of a parent is defined by its authority over the child, prefacing their social relational theory on the concept that “children are active agents in their own socialization, that causality between parents and children is bidirectional.” When adults deny children their self-determination, it arguably violates the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (ratified by 189 countries, the U.S. being the glaring omission): “Every child has the right to be listened to and to have their opinions taken seriously when decisions are being made about their lives.” This is particularly important in the case of what Solomon coins “horizontal identities”, those aspects of ourselves which are not handed down from our parents by nature or nurture but diverge from their own experience and, often, escape their understanding.
A piece of hate mail I received in response to my recent essay in HuffPost says the quiet part out loud: “Your daughter is going to regret the day she decided to transition and look to you as the adult who should have had her best interests at heart and exercised mature judgment with regard to life altering steps at 11 years of age. Do you recall when you were 11 years old? Unless you were a child prodigy, I seriously doubt you had the maturity to make any drastic decision about what you wanted to be as an adult.”
My son E. is smart, empathic, and mature beyond his years. When he came out to us in fourth grade, he’d only landed on the language to describe his transness a week or so earlier but arrived at the dinner table with a fully fleshed out understanding of his identity.
“Mama, there’s something I need to tell you,” he said while awaiting his cheeseburger, his serious tone incongruent with his broad smile. “I’m trans. My pronouns are he/him. And I’m changing my name.”
He looked happier than I’d seen him since kindergarten. His “best interests” are exactly what we acted on, when his dad and I embraced him as the person he knew himself to be. What hubris it would be to think that we know him better than he does.
~~~

I know better than to discount my fortune that the narrative of me as a parent—mothering as a verb—continues in the present tense, while Li’s has crashed to its conclusion. I can love E. and S. here in front of me, hold them, project them into the future. Li, however, is forced to console herself with the notion that, “more important than loving is understanding and respecting [her] children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.”
To be human is to live with existential dread. Parenting magnifies that dread exponentially. But, in order to function, we must keep it tucked away in some inaccessible recess of our minds. Must tell ourselves we are in control even when the evidence across millennia threatens that necessary delusion. One of the ways we maintain the pretense is by transforming experience into narrative. Shaping and sharing our stories. The storyteller exerts a mastery of causality, linking events into chains which seem to add up to truth. In the retrospective, however, one is left with the feeling that the story could have had a different ending.
This is especially true of stories that end in suicide. We perceive the act as a decision—which leaves open the possibility that the deceased could have chosen otherwise. That their survivors could have intervened to change the outcome.
From the moment I heard my dad had killed himself, however, I understood and respected it. Like Li in the wake of her sons’ suicides, I felt in the aftermath like that reaction was more sublime than love, or perhaps its ultimate manifestation. While Things in Nature Merely Grow offers readers Li’s philosophical musings on this, it fails to grapple with what James’ state of mind actually was, dismissing it as irrelevant or insignificant. In doing so, she creates the unintended perception that she didn’t feel responsible for it or capable of trying to help.
“Parenting—is that not the ultimate effort to hold a place for children, so that, to the best of one’s ability, they can be given all they need to grow?” Li wonders, but quickly dismisses it as futile. “The children are bound to outgrow the space the parents provide.”
I’m sure she would concur, however, that, in the prospective we must do anything, everything, we can to protect our children and keep them alive. That, not understanding them—and emphatically not asserting dominion over them—is our most fundamental responsibility as parents. Even if that alone can’t always prevent the worst from happening. Our limitations do not obviate the need to do whatever we can. They make it more important.
As fertile as I’ve found this foray into existential dread, I have to put it back on the shelf. Parenting in the present vs. the past requires that separation from the theoretical. The day-to-day takes place on a more physical and practical plane, and my children demand every ounce of functionality I can muster.
Still, beyond meeting their needs on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s incumbent on me to make sure they have the space to imagine a life for themselves. A life that’s authentic and right to them—no matter the extent to which it exceeds my own imagination.
“It’s been my experience that adults…are extremely good at underestimating children,” Li writes. “A 10-year-old already has the capacity to understand life’s bleakness.” They also have the capacity to know themselves, if not always the words to express it.
But allowing E. to self-actualize is not only about honoring that ability. It’s also about the basic need to keep him alive. According to the Trevor Project, 46 percent of trans and nonbinary youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year and 16 percent made an attempt. Living in a supportive home reduces the incidence by a third. When E. came out, supporting him was our only option.
In this fractured and contentious climate, however, our support of his transition—social and then legal and medical—is insufficient. We must also ensure he can survive the bleakness, which is why my husband and I are doing all we can to help create a future our son wants to live in, not just imagine.
We have to hope that it’s enough.

Yiyun Li, award-winning author of novels like "The Book of Goose," "The Vagrants," "Where Reasons End," etc., and nonfiction like her memoir "Dear Friend, from My Life to You in Your Life," and now this book, has explored some of her most difficult moments through her writing. But everything I read by her leaves me in such a state of peaceful thought, as if I had just done some sort of mind yoga in a few hundred pages—flexing and moving throughout poses that strain and stretch the muscles of my mind and spending plenty of time in a reflective, calming Shavasana.

However, this book wasn't an easy read by any means. Li and her husband had two children, Vincent and James. Both have since passed away. Vincent committed suicide at age sixteen in 2017, and James committed suicide at age nineteen in 2024. Even though this book discusses the weighty topics of suicide, depression, and abuse, this book isn't overtly sad. Rather, it's a contemplative account of her life after the death of her sons, a tale of her "radical acceptance" of what could be the worst situation a mother could find herself in. She describes continuing with her own life, "doing the things that work" and remembering her sons through them, like "writing, gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death."

Li wrote her novel, "Where Reasons End," as an imagined dialogue between herself and Vincent. But this book is written for James. She openly admits throughout the book that writing a book for James is a different challenge than writing for Vincent. Vincent was also the more creative, emotional, and flamboyant brother, while James was reserved and calm. Writing a fictional novel to honor Vincent and the way he lived, spoke, and thought was almost easier, for lack of better words. But Li says multiple times that James probably would not think much of this book she wrote for him. That raw honesty Li shows when writing about the differences between her sons and the wholeness with which she knows them was so impactful. I found this book to be phenomenal. Her writing always leaves me with so much thought and peace, which sometimes feels like a contradiction. This was a testament to the character of James, to Vincent in some ways, and also to Li. While not necessarily a topic I can relate to, I think it’s an important read when considering grief and remembering from any position relating to loss.

Thanks to #NetGalley and #Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an advanced copy of Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li.

At this point Yiyun Li has become a must-read author for me. I view her as one of the most courageous authors and humans on the planet right now. To forge ahead after the tragedies she’s endured is nothing short of incredible. But she hasn’t only survived, she’s helped others do so as well.

I’m plagued by depression and during my episodes am prone to suicidal ideations and for so long I felt like there was no author who could quite articulate what I was feeling and so I felt alone. Then I read her book Where Reasons End and felt like a light had reached inside of me to say you are not alone in this world. That feeling is priceless.

This memoir is a clarion call to all those who’ve suffered tragedy to let them know how life goes on. Because it does. For the family who suffered the loss life has to go on and Ms. Li, better than any author out there, explains what that looks and feels like.

My sincere gratitude to #NetGalley, #Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and the author for allowing me the honor of reading an advanced copy of this beautiful collection.

I admire Yiyun Li because she processes experience intellectually - she thinks on it, dissects it, considers the facts. It’s not that emotion doesn’t exist; rather, in order for her to understand what she’s feeling, an interrogation must occur cerebrally, within the limits and confines of language.

As someone who also processes life like this - particularly when it comes to personal challenges - reading Things in Nature Merely Grow felt oddly affirming.

A strange thing to say about a book which deals with the death of her son James by suicide, 6 years after her older son, Vincent, also took his own life.

For many, this feels unimaginable. But it DID happened. In her clear-sighted, careful way, Li takes the reader through a processing of sorts, to honour James and to honour what it means to live both as a mother and as a human being in, as she calls it, the abyss of the after.

Some readers may find her tone - factual, focused, observant - upsetting. Where is the pain and outage, where is the loud suffering. But she’s speaking the truth with a frankness I applaud.

“Where can we live but in days,” she says. Another thing: “Despite catastrophes, I am still myself.” One can live in a new and terrible normal and still read books, take piano lessons, travel, swim, laugh with friends. One still has to clean the house, go grocery shopping. Why pretend otherwise? Why gloss over the realities of living alongside death? Her tender recounting of moments she experienced with her sons are all the more meaningful for not being falsely rendered.

Pretending is something I personally detest - it’s infantilising to me when people act like everything is going to work out because the truth is, maybe it won’t. What Li is trying to work through, using the practice of radical acceptance, is how to move forward anyway.

This isn’t about me, but I think when you come from a family that’s experienced tragedies, as I do, you will recognise the unique condition of sitting always alongside pain and allowing into your life the experience of joy anyway. But whatever your circumstances, there is much you can learn here. Highly recommend.

Li writes on a topic so heavy, yet from a place of stoicism and acceptance. This is a unique memoir of grief. loss, and dedication to her two sons that both died by suicide. An unimaginable tragedy for a mother, yet will be a quietly, impactful book for many.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

This reflection from a mother who has lost two sons to suicide was utterly gutting and haunting. The writing gorgeous and she somehow manages to write coherently about the "abyss" of grief. Even though the loss is horrible, it's not the kind of book where you cry with the author. Instead, in honor of her more analytical son James, she invites you to just make the abyss less lonely and join her there for a while. I'll be thinking about the ways she depicted grief and the so-called grieving process for a while.

This may be the strongest and most impactful memoir I've read so far. Reading this felt like an exclusive look into her highly intelligent brain. This book doesn't exist to answer questions and ponder the "what-if's" that suicide survivors are often left with alongside immense grief. And this wasn't a book about grief, although Yiyun Li very well could have made this about grief because God knows that she's carrying enough of it. It wasn't a manual or guide to the steps of the grieving process and I'm so glad that it wasn't. This book was a celebration of Li's son's lives and their very beings that made them each unique and I enjoyed how she incorporated hers and their love of literature into it. As someone who has lost someone to suicide, I wasn't sure what emotions would surface while reading this, but it was also why I was drawn to request this title in the first place. I especially enjoyed the part where Li talks about well-meaning people and how they've come across while enduring loss and her description was spot on. Only those who have been there will understand. I haven't read Li's other works so THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW was my starting point, but I loved her melodic writing style and tremendous intelligence that seeps through every page. I will be a return reader.

In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li writes of the suicide of her younger son just a few years after the suicide of her eldest son. She shares much of her personal experience in a direct, genuine, and deeply honest way. I appreciated her bravery in telling her story and in attempting to enter the mind and experience of her son, as well. She does not hold back from recounting the full tragedy of her losses and the ongoing, daily reality of living without her children.

Despite the difficult topic, each time I had to put this book down, I looked forward to finding time to pick it up again. It's the beauty of the language and the absolute mastery in the writing, combined with the author's deeply insightful and reflective thoughts, that made this one of the very best reading experiences I have had in a long time. This is the third book by Yiyun Li I have read, and I feel even more compelled now to read all she has published to date.

Thank you to the publisher for the digital review copy.

Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow is a profoundly intimate exploration of tragedy, love, and the human ability to live alongside unimaginable loss. In this memoir, Li confronts the deaths by suicide of her two children — first her son Vincent in 2017 at age 16, and then her son James in 2024 at age 19 — and traces the shock, silence, and enduring questions that followed.

I think one of the main things that struck me about this memoirs was the way Li avoids framing her story in conventional terms of “healing” or “recovery.” Instead, her narrative finds form in small details — phone messages, a family dog, her children’s books — and in the elemental (often cold) process of a world that grows and evolves regardless of human tragedy. There’s a remarkable discipline in her writing; her style is clear, sparse, and precise, reflecting a mind trying to make peace with a chaos it can’t control.

Highly recommended.

i feel like i read a lot of dark books. every reader personality quiz i’ve ever taken says i like to read complex and introspective narratives, whatever that means. i think it just means that i should probably cry more.

if you are looking to cry, look no further than things in nature merely grow. in this book, yiyun li writes about her experience losing both of her sons to suicide. “there is no good way to say this” is oft repeated in this book and in reviews of it, likely because it’s true. how do you put words to something so tragic in a way that is “good” for anyone to hear?

to be quite honest, this is the most difficult book i have ever read. it is just sad, and it ruined me. yiyun li writes with such adoration and compassion for her sons. more than anything, this is a book about a mother who loved her children. and sometimes, that is just not enough. and it’s heartbreaking.

i paired this book with yiyun li’s recent new yorker pieces and would highly recommend doing so. her writing is just so thoughtful and beautiful, and i appreciated seeing how she has channeled her love for her sons into her work in various forms.

thank you to @fsgbooks for the arc!! i fear i will be thinking about this book every single day for the rest of my life.

A beautifully poignant book that, despite not being an exercise in emotion, is filled with so much tenderness it made me weep. Yiyun Li is one of the most thoughtful writers alive—whenever I pick up her work, I feel deeply engaged in an intellectual way. The way she writes here about such an intense type of grief was remarkably measured, even though she admitted to being bewildered and confused by that grief. Which makes sense, no? I can’t understand her specific pain, but through reading this book I understand the ways that grief is hyper-individual and destabilizing in myriad ways. And I only begin to understand the immense love that Li felt—and still feels, and will feel every single day for the rest of her life—for her sons.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the early look at this book in exchange for my honest thoughts.

Things in Nature Merely Grow was such a beautiful, heartbreaking memoir about a mother trying to come to terms with the sudden deaths of her two sons. She articulates the unimaginable pain so well, and hearing the personal details about each made everything even more tragic. I enjoyed many of Yiyun Li's novels and short stories, and her nonfiction - though obviously a tough subject - was crafted with the same crisp language and attention to detail.

Reading Yiyun Li is always difficult, precisely because of how real and raw her writing is. When I read the subject of this book, I knew this would be almost impossible to finish. And it was. I needed to keep taking breaks. All I can say is, what a gift Yiyun Li is to the world of literature.

Echoing what others have said, it doesn't feel quite right to be reviewing a book like this. I have previously read Li's novel 'Where Reasons End' and was taken in by her ability to write about such a tragedy so beautifully. The same goes for this book and I very much appreciated getting a window into an experience that very few people could even imagine going through.

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.

a difficult book to both rate and review — but definitely one worth reading, despite the difficult (and even this is an understatement!) topic. one of my best reads this year!

Following the death by suicide of her oldest son, Vincent, Li set to work crafting a powerful novel of motherly love told through a dialogue between a grieving mother and her late son. Li writes that the novel“was as much written for Vincent as it was written by Vincent,” as it was crafted in his artistic and creative style.

When, 6 years later, Li’s younger son, James, died in the same manner, Li set out to write “the book for James.” However, she found that a work meant to honor this boy; in his logic, intelligence, and eccentricities, could not be a work of fiction, but needed to be radically honest.

Things in Nature Merely Grow is a work of “radical acceptance,” of Li’s grief. In it, she makes no meaning of her losses, but rather shares stories of her sons, her experiences with others in the wake of loss, and her tempestuous relationship with the written word, about which she says, “if one has to live with the extremity of losing two children, an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune.”

Li’s approach to grief felt completely foreign to me. As someone who feels deeply, I struggled to imagine acceptance as a coping strategy, and I suppose that’s why it’s important to read. Yet at the same time, there were some sentences that felt wrong, primarily the ones that frame James’ death as a choice. Research shows that people who die by suicide do so because they do not see another choice. So while, yes, suicide is a choice in the way, say, a heart attack isn’t, framing radical acceptance as “respecting [one’s] children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives,” felt like an injustice. I can’t help but wonder if this statement creates a false narrative that those who die by suicide are choosing another path which we should simply accept.

We expect grieving mothers to act a certain way, and this is not my attempt to put Li in that box. Her experience and grief are valid, and her writing about it is epitomized in this statement: “Children die, and parents go on living— this, too, is a fact that defies all adjectives.” This novel made me feel deeply and think about grief in new ways. I’m so glad I read it.

I've never read a grief memoir like this. I felt like I was truly inside Li's mind and it resonated with me in countless ways. This is incredible.

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 can't believe this book.

It is really difficult to review this book, it feels wrong to. What a woman Yiyun Li is and what a spectacular writer she is. I think her words in this book will stay with me for a long long time. A book I will return to and I book I will learn from. I cannot recommend it more highly. All my admiration and good thoughts to the author. Everyone should read this book.