Yiyun Li’s memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” stuns with its lucidity and with the nightmarish facts that prompted its writing. As Li explains, “My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”
Recommending Li’s book feels like pushing people toward exposure therapy. It’s a hard sell, “written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be,” with no “neat narrative arc” taking readers “from suffering to transcendence.”
Like Edward Hirsch’s searing book-length poem about the childhood and death of his son, “Gabriel,” Li’s memoir is as much a meditation on parental love and remembrance as it is one of anguish. Also the author of five novels, she refutes the idea of grief as “a process that has an end point,” and turns to a speech in Shakespeare’s “King John,” where, after her son is killed, a mother says, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me / Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words / Remembers me of all his gracious parts, / Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.”
In those words, Li finds a reason to be fond of grief “as much as a mother has reason to love her children.”
That suffering realigns life for Li, rendering it “an abyss.” Even telling strangers how many children she has is no longer simple. She wonders, “What do you call parents who can no longer parent?” While others see only her loss, Li explains that being a mother who “can no longer mother her children won’t change the fact that her thoughts are mostly a mother’s thoughts.”
Much of the book focuses on how Li inhabits that abyss, finds meaning and carries on. She writes that a loved one’s death “can feel like a black hole, depleting all one’s energy” with the exception of one particular sense — time. Where time was once “fleeting” and “winged,” now “time stands still, time feels monotonous, and then time becomes Sisyphus’ boulder.”
Sustaining Li now is a philosophy of radical acceptance, where “the questions of whys and hows and wherefores or the wishful thinking of what-ifs” are rendered useless. It can feel shocking in practice, especially when Li discusses coming to terms with her sons’ deaths:
“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.”
