Things in Nature Merely Grow
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
Short-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
One of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.
“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 sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. 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 time line.” 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 “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.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
By sharing an incredibly difficult journey, Yiyun Li reinforces that there is no right way to deal with loss. Having coped with, as much as someone can, the suicide of her teenage son Vincent, the subsequent and eerily similar death of her younger son, James, then a freshman in college, caught her off guard. The author compares and contrasts the feelings that she experienced and coping mechanisms that she relied on after each tragedy. The latter involved the physical act of gardening as well as seeking wisdom from the works of literary masters like Albert Camus and Leo Tolstoy to connect with the universality of emotional pain. Equally at play is Li’s upbringing in China, which colours her responses to the challenges of living. Things in Nature Merely Grow examines grief not as something you get over but as something you carry with you for life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intimate memoir, novelist Li (Wednesday's Child) remembers her teenage sons, James and Vincent, after their deaths by suicide. Though she centers the account around James, who died more recently, Li recounts both boys' lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each. Li writes of marking her time after James's death with piano lessons, swimming, and gardening, and gradually coming to realize that death altered neither the facts about her sons nor her relationship to them. "In this abyss that I call my life, facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to," she explains. "It's not much, this holding on, and yet it's the best I can do." She also details childhood abuse at the hands of her mother and her own battle with depression, which she recalls with wrenching immediacy. Throughout, Li draws on references to grief in literature, including Shakespeare's Richard II and Euripides, though she ultimately refuses to call what she's going through "grieving" because it "seems to indicate a process that has an end point." Readers who've dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here.
