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Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction, including Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, as well as the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. More about this author >
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“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 both: Vincent in 2017, at 16, James in 2024, at 19. 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 can: “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.”
A deep and austere memoir about her sons’ suicides, Things in Nature Merely Grow refuses to be captured by prevailing narratives of grief and mourning. Instead, Yiyun Li embraces radical acceptance. She strives to create an alphabet capable of articulating experiences in extremity, for which language so often falls short. Grounded on facts, for, as she argues, “not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice,” Li offers an unforgettable perspective on loss.
Yiyun Li at the 2025 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
