In “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Yiyun Li writes from a terrain no one chooses to map. Her spare memoir confronts the suicide of her younger son James in 2024, six years and four months after her older son Vincent ended his life. Vincent was 16 when he died in 2017; James was 19. Both died near their home in Princeton, N.J. “This book is about life’s extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be,” notes Li early on in her new book. Like her earlier semi-autobiographical “Where Reasons End” (2019), her latest work resists consolation. But where that earlier novel staged a freewheeling dialogue between a mother and her dead son, “Things in Nature Merely Grow” eschews the imagined comforts of fictional forms. “Fiction is tamer than life,” she writes.
Li is not interested in tameness.
Writing from the abyss, she clings resolutely to facts, largely to honor her younger son’s empirical cast of mind. As she records, “Vincent lived feelingly. James lived thinkingly. When Vincent died, I was able to conjure him up in a book by feeling, but I knew, right after James died, that I would not be able to do that for him. James would not like a book written from feelings.” James, we learn, was something of a prodigy at learning languages — he taught himself Welsh, German, Romanian, and Russian, and his phone was set in Lithuanian — though he was never talkative. At six, he told his mother that he was still suffering from “monophobia.” The mother, like this reader, had to look up the word, which means a morbid dread of being alone. He was very close with his older brother and when Vincent died, he retreated further into silence. A lover of philosophy, he spent most of his senior year of high school immersing himself in the writings of Wittgenstein.
After James’s death, Li rereads the work of the Austrian philosopher, hoping to better understand her son’s logical worldview. Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” ends with the famous line “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” but Li quotes instead from his foreboding introduction: “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it — or similar thoughts.” She also studies a linguistic logic textbook and reads thirteen books by Euclid, which she finds less difficult to parse than works of philosophy (she had been reared to become a math genius, but geometry was not one of her strong suits). These are all projects intended to keep her occupied with “things that work,” one of the tips in a manual of dialectical behavior therapy that she consulted after her own “suicidal depression” several years ago.
Her book is, among other things, a kind of manual on how to write honestly about the death of loved ones. Throughout, Li refreshingly refuses to indulge in the tired metaphorical thinking that death often invites. Nature itself — so often a ready-made storehouse of symbols — is stripped of such import. When someone sends her a photograph of spring flowers after James’s death celebrating “earth’s regenerative power,” Li bristles at the cliché. “There is no suicidal or angry rose,” she writes. Flowers live until they die; they are not evidence of hope, not signs of a cosmic kindness. The choice of title gestures toward an ecology of persistence rather than recovery. “Merely” is the crucial word here: there is no grandeur, no redemptive arc, only the ongoing, indifferent fact of existence.
This stripping away of false consolation also extends to time and language. In most grief narratives, time is an implicit protagonist: the slow work of healing, the gradual return to hope. Li rejects this arc entirely. Seasons pass, but they pass without bearing meaning. Time does not console or transform; it simply accumulates, indifferent to human endurance or collapse. Li’s days, in the aftermath of James’s death, are spent swimming, taking piano lessons, writing, reading, teaching, baking, and weeding. One of her closest friends, Brigid (presumably the editor Brigid Hughes), helps her send and answer emails in the wake of James’ death; another coordinates a meal train to ensure that practical care continues in the months that follow. These forms of solicitude are a balm to Li and her husband, but she accepts that, at the end of the day, “there is no shared abyss; we each dwell alone in our own,” she writes.
Li’s style, honed over decades, has never been more distilled. Appropriately for a book that purports to stenograph only her thoughts, she writes in a simple, pared-back language, shunning clichés and actively avoiding adjectives and adverbs. Still, there are flashes of lyricism, as when Li muses that “life after a major crisis stands preternaturally still, the way I imagine the windless calm in the eye of a hurricane.” One word that takes on perhaps unintended significance is “ward,” which refers not only to the guardianship of a child, but to the act of watching or guarding as well as a psychiatric institute. Li stayed at one such institute for three weeks after a botched suicide attempt. What drove her into that ward, she writes, was living in a world of “unreality, which was made of thought and logic” of a kind not to be trusted. Then, as now, in the time after James’s death, she finds a refuge in words: in reading them and writing them. Even if words can’t offer “real salvation from one’s own life,” they yield a close-enough approximation of it.
Other sections recount Li’s own turbulent childhood, which was marked by the demands and punishments of an abusive mother, who claimed Li was her “favored daughter,” but whose cruelty persists into adulthood. After Vincent’s death, Li’s mother informed her that “there was some karma in my losing a child: I had failed to return her love for me.” Nor was such harsh judgment confined to her family. After her second son’s death, Li notes the censoriousness of the Chinese media, which labeled her a “traitor [who] deserves to be punished” for the superadded crime of abandoning her mother tongue and “turning my back on my mother country.” (Elsewhere, Li has spoken about her refusal to have her books translated into Chinese.)
“Things in Nature Merely Grow” is ultimately a work of what Li calls “radical acceptance.” It eschews tidy narratives, and its adherents “live only with meaningful placeholders.” It’s a representatively bleak statement in a book that elicits many difficult feelings. I had to put it down at several places before I found myself able to return to it. Yet Li’s brutal lucidity — her refusal to burnish her thoughts and sentiments to a high sheen — is its own form of ethical commitment: to honoring James and Vincent not as figures in a morality tale, but as beloved and irreplaceable sons.
Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, frieze, The New Republic, Vogue, and more.
THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW
By Yiyun Li
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $26