Yiyun Li’s new work Things in Nature Merely Grow is a hard book to review, but not a hard one to feel. This book, a story told in a mere 192 pages, attempts (and, to me, succeeds) to sit in the abyss that is loss—an abyss that all of us will face one way or another, sooner or later. It’s a hard book to review because of the scope of its efforts, because of the poignancy in which it cuts so purely to its point: that people die, and people keep on living.
In a span of just a few short years, Li lost both of her sons, Vincent (16) and James (19), to suicide. The prospect of losing even one child to suicide is incomprehensible to most, but to lose both is a tragedy so immense people avoid thinking about it, become awkward in its reality, at a loss for the words to take up the space. This book is dedicated to Li’s son, James (she wrote a book for Vincent in the form of a novel previously). Within its pages, she tries to find the words for her son, who was a young man of few words himself. James was contemplative, intelligent, quiet, and suffered his biggest loss in the form of losing his brother, Vincent.
What I found to be so profound about this book is its unique approach to loss. I’ve read Yiyun Li’s fiction before—she is a master of words, a master of making ideas flow flawlessly from thought to paper. I knew that the prose of this book would be just as strong as her fiction writing, but what I perhaps hadn’t put enough thought to was how starkly different the ideas within this book would be than what I expected. Having been fortunate enough to evade immense loss in my life, though not naive enough to believe I won’t encounter it in the future, I’ve still read books that tackle grief and pain. They talk about finding comfort, finding solace, finding meaning within those losses, but Li suggests something that I’ve seldom seen in books grappling with grief…that things in nature merely grow.
What Li means by this is perhaps what one may imagine…that despite our losses, the world keeps on turning, and we in turn must keep on living. The world is indifferent to our loss, and there is nothing to do but sit in it. This isn’t something that is phrased as a life sentence, though, and is rather something that is a fact we must learn to reckon with, a truth we must come to face.
The most unique thing about this book—and something that I learned from, as someone who is deeply emotional and instinctively reactive—is how Li views her sons’ suicides as choices that need to be respected. At no point in this work does she view them as anything but well-thought-out, adult, mature decisions. It was abundantly clear from page one that Li knows and knew her sons’ minds intimately and tended to them with great care throughout their childhood, and therefore it would stand to reason that she trusts that the decision they made is one that came from great consideration and great resolve that she respects—as painful as that result may be. Before this book, I don’t think I had ever considered my own reaction, in my own limited experience with suicide, to be able to be anything but anger and sadness. Li, through this work, opened up new channels for me to think through loss by staring it straight in the face, by painting it as nothing but what it truly is…an abyss, in its rawest form. Li states that “not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice”, and holds true to that throughout.
This is a hard book. Losing two children is an incredibly hard thing. No matter where you stand on grief—whether you’re entirely free of it, drowning in it, or somewhere in between—I suggest letting Yiyun Li’s words wash over you, for in this tribute you may just find something in which to feel solace. “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.”
NONFICTION
Things In Nature Merely Grow
By Yiyun Li
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published May 20, 2025
