Posted by: samhiggins



Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Sam Higgins

For a while, I had kept up with every single one of Yiyun Li’s publications, but the radical increase in Asian American lit meant that I started to fall behind. I’ve missed, for instance, The Book of Goose, but when Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG, 2025) was announced, I knew I had to read it. The topic of this creative nonfiction publication is obviously harrowing (for lack of a better word):

“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 timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking, 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, is, and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were, 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.” Hmmm. I’m not sure if she would have approved of the last line of this marketing description. There is no triumphal tone to this work. The title really says it all. The other key element is that Li is not a fan of the word “grief” or “grieving.”

Once you get further into the book, Li discusses her beef with the terms, given that they potentially imply a kind of limited condition that will eventually be over. Li lives in something called the “abyss,” which is always in the now. While the book does explore the death of both children, Li does make it clear that this book is a way to engage with James’s death. Li writes a book in the aftermath of Vincent’s death, a tough novel called Where Reasons End. It’s been a while since I read it, but that one was more or less structured about a mother’s conversations with her child, who has passed away. It’s not a ghost thing, but rather a kind of philosophical approach toward life and death. The novel’s germination came partly from Li’s understanding of her first son as someone who is very invested in feelings and emotion. For Li, the same kind of book cannot be written for James precisely because he is more withdrawn and more logical. Li calls Vincent someone who lives feelingly, while James is someone who lives thinkingly. In this respect, Li essentially states there is no way to write properly for James in terms of the representational terrain because of this aspect of his personality. He cannot be recovered in the same way, nor could Li even venture to do so. For Li, then, this creative nonfictional work is the closest she can venture to him in the wake of his death. The other things I appreciated were when Li includes important missives and perspectives made my friends and loved ones, who help Li and her husband through different things that come up related to James’s death. They often speak with the kind of bluntness that one might need, even at such devastating moments.

There is one final section that I found the most powerful: the parts where Li calls out all of those who could not properly consider the state that Li and her husband were in and who reached out in violent ways. One example is when someone connects with Li to express condolences about her son’s passing and then mentions something about how they have a child who is also a writer and that they have taken the liberty of attaching a manuscript for Li to provide feedback on. I literally gasped reading this section. Li gives people like this one a lot of grace, far more than I would have had. This creative nonfiction is a very tough read, but I can say that this work is truly extraordinary in the way that Li opens up the reading world to her abyss. It is, in this sense, what we might call a dark gift.

Buy the Book Here

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