Beyond grief
Yiyun Li's stunning memoir is a work of philosophy and radical acceptance
I was reading a newspaper comment section last week (which I really must stop doing, it only makes me feel gloomy) and someone wrote, “why would anyone read this book?” about a memoir of intense loss (I forget its name) to which people replied variations of: because we are drawn to car crashes; because we are sad, horrible people who like to read about sad, horrible things; because we want to feel better about our lives.
And I thought, that is SO NOT why people read memoir! The reason I love to read factual books about ‘sad horrible things’ (if we are going to be really reductive about it) is to expand my understanding of humanity. It is an exercise in gratitude, yes, but not in a Gosh lucky me thank goodness that isn’t my life! (what a gross way to approach art) but rather, How lucky am I to be allowed to read such profound, personal things from someone who has gone through experiences I will likely never know the depth of? I read memoir because I am fascinated and humbled by the infinite scape - and scope - of human experience, and our capacity for compassion, cruelty, resilience. It’s like looking at a mountain and feeling awed. Memoirs are my sublime.
I was recently interviewed by Annie Mac, who asked me about the last book that changed me, and I realised that every single book changes me in some way, even if it’s tiny and fleeting. That’s the point of books. That’s their power. (I’m talking about the good ones. The bad ones I never think of again.) But some books change you in big C ways - I think about Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger most days. I planned to write about three such memoirs today, but then I got to the end of writing about the first one and it was so long, I thought: this deserves a whole letter.
Before I get into it, an emotional disclaimer of sorts: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li is one of the most astounding memoirs I have ever read, but it requires a certain kind of fortitude to read it. I say a certain kind of fortitude because otherwise it implies that I am a Woman of Fortitude, and I’m not, I’m terrified of planes, boats, lifts, heights, rollercoasters, crowds and knives, just for starters. But it is about the death of children, and I think you are either someone who has the bandwidth for that, or you are not. My husband categorically did not have it in him for Hamnet. And that’s a novel, or at least a novel based on the facts of a long time ago. But Yiyun Li’s book is not a novel, it’s a memoir and “there is no good way to say this”, as she puts it, it is about the death of both of her sons, by suicide. But it also so much more than these devastating facts. If you have it in you to stay with me while I explain why, please do.
Li is a novelist, memoirist, Princeton professor and a mother without sons. Her eldest son Vincent died in 2017, aged 16, and her younger son, James, died in 2024, aged 19. She begins the book shortly after James dies, from what she calls her ‘abyss’.
“One can write about facts feelingly, one can write about feelings matter-of-factly, but one should never evade facts. So here I am, in this dire place, which few parents live in (at least in a contemporary setting, where life is not ravished by man-made or natural disasters.) I’ve decided to write this book starting with a single established fact: I am in an abyss.”
The book is dedicated to James and written shortly after his death (her novel, Where Reasons End, was dedicated to Vincent and she has also written several short stories for The New Yorker, inspired by her sons), but Li is adamant that this is not a book of grief. She refuses the mantle - because ‘grief’ is a process with an end, “and I don’t want an end point to my sorrow” - and decides that time itself, with its pillars of past/ present/ future, is also useless.
“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.”
Li describes her sons as ‘peculiar’ and ‘sensitive’, but very different. “Vincent lived feelingly. James lived thinkingly.” (After reading this, I spent quite some time thinking about which category I would put the people I love into.) Her oldest son, Vincent, was “flamboyantly handsome”, chattering and arguing with his mother endlessly. “Her younger son, James, spoke only when he felt the need (which was not often.) The boys were not, as conventional narrative might summarise, simply ‘depressed’. Their decision to opt out of life arose from opposing forces. For Vincent, life was too much. “He lived at a spectacular height, unrestrained in his joy and in his despair.” For James - who was clearly a once-in-a-generation mind, an autist who could read fluently at two-and-a-half years old and spoke eight languages - life felt mediocre, “not worth the trouble”. There is a loneliness to being that exceptional.
Li finds herself in a similarly lonely position when James dies, because she responds to her son’s death in ways that her peers do not understand. She includes a letter, written to her by an editor friend, Deborah, who explains why people are uneasy around her:
“For almost everyone (at least, in their projections), the emotional reaction would come first - an overwhelming, explosive outburst of grief, hair-tearing, self-recriminations - and would be followed by more rational, intellectual reflection much later, once that tempest had blown over. So for you to go directly to the intellectual side of yourself confuses people: so few people are capable of going directly there that they don’t believe you can; they feel you must be ignoring or repressing the reaction that they would have. It also means that they can’t offer you the help that they would want to receive in your place… Hence the loneliness of mourning as you do: not only are you mourning but the form of your grief and your ways of approaching it are not understood, or are misinterpreted.”
On reading the letter, and feeling seen by her friend, Li feels her loneliness lifting.
For Li, writing about her sons is not an act of catharsis (something people often attribute to memoir-writing, particularly about loss), but it offers “the solace of thinking”. Writing it in less than two months was like being at the very “centre of the hurricane”, she told The Guardian’s Sophie McBain, where all is still. When she finished writing, the hurricane resumed. “My life goes on as a very strange woman,” she says. “Going out, people will always look at me and say, ‘Poor woman’.” (Li accepts that her loss is unfathomable, but she does not see herself as a tragic figure.)
After Vincent died, a few of his friends’ parents asked Li if they could tell their children that he had died in an accident. Li, who believes that “Death, particularly suicide, cannot be softened or sugarcoated” is ‘baffled’.
“I explained to the mothers that their proposal seemed to be a disrespect of their own children and a violation of Vincent’s memory. Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.”
Respect is everything to Li. “[M]ore important than loving is understanding and respecting my children”. This means seeing her children as autonomous beings, rather than extensions of herself or her husband, which in turns means honouring “their choices to end their lives.”
What struck me about this book - aside from the generosity of the author to share such candid truths about her family and her own self - is its innovation. What might exist beyond grief? What could it look like to be outside of time? What if Li refused to accept guilt? (She herself had once tried to take her own life - something she does not shy away from mentioning, nor do several friends, and which was used against her in China, from where she received appalling abuse, when this was made public.) Li is a truly original thinker, and this is the first grief memoir I’ve ever read that is so defiantly resistant to its own mode and the accepted model of grief, mourning, healing. I’m curious as to whether booksellers honour this - do they put Li’s book on the grief/death shelf, or the self-help one, or do they put her, where I imagine she’d like to be, on philosophy? (Amazon have put it in Death & Bereavement. I hope small independent bookshops are more thoughtful.)
Li interrogates something that she knows other people are also wondering about (indeed, one plain-talking friend brought it up with her, something she did not dislike as much as she disliked the mothers asking if they could lie to their children about Vincent’s death), which is that, given her own history of suicidal ideations, could she have intercepted and somehow prevented, her sons’ deaths? If she had discussed with Vincent at a young age, the nature of suffering, “that there are things worth suffering for”, that “one’s relationship with one’s suffering can change”, that she had once wanted to end her life and no longer felt that way, would it have helped? With Vincent, she thinks, maybe. With James, who was so private, so resolute in his thinking, she suspects not.
Not all friendships can survive the death a child. This might be because the friend is uneasy around death and thus, evade you (Rob Delaney, whose son Henry died aged 2, once told Marc Maron that it was as if he and his wife were contagious; as if you could ‘catch’ a dead child through proximity), whilst others might say something too stupid or crass to move past: “everything happens for a reason”; “god had a greater plan”; “he’s somewhere better now”; “I understand your pain because my pet died”. The most egregious instance Li describes - and really, I still cannot wrap my head around this - is when a woman visits the author and her husband to complain that Vincent had not sent a goodbye text to her daughter, when he had sent one to two of his other friends. Clearly, he did not deem her daughter to be a true confidante, which had hurt her daughter’s feelings. The mother wanted to elicit an apology from them, on their dead son’s behalf.
Things in Nature Merely Grow reminded me at times of Man’s Search for Meaning, written by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl while he was in Auschwitz. Li’s memoir is written in peacetime, but it is also a “memoir about life’s extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.” As it is to read Frankl (who found out when he left Auschwitz that his wife and daughter had been killed), to read it is to boggle that this person is writing with such grace and still and with such determined lack of self-pity. For Li, the most important thing is to accept the terms as their own, not to dress them up in finery or false assurances.
“So, dear readers: if a mother using the word “died” or “death” offends your sensibilities… if you think suicide is too depressing a subject, if the fact that all things insoluble in life remain insoluble is too bleak for you, if you prefer that radical acceptance remain a foreign concept to you, then this a good time to stop reading.”
Li’s memoir strikes me as a breath-taking riposte not just to this era of fake news (with its emphasis on unadorned facts) and to the panacea of self-care, which seeks to smoothe and soothe all personal and social injury. “What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification”, she writes. Reading Li’s book reads like a rally cry not not just to feel but more importantly to think, to never ever abandon the facts, to resist the self-indulgence of guilt and to see a life as more than its tragic end. It is not an easy read, and that is entirely the point; Li rejects facile dogma - “This book will not provide the easy satisfaction of fulfilment, inspiration, and transformation” - in favour of something knottier. It is not a book about overcoming loss, but learning to live alongside it.
“The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from.”
Despite Li’s resoluteness that this is not a book written to help, in stripping itself right down to the bone, it absolutely will benefit anyone who reads it and not just those grieving, or not grieving, as Li would have it. It will speak to mothers, grappling with the limitations of their role (“a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child” - oh, I feel this so deeply!), to people who are depressed (Li mentions things she tried when suicidally depressed, such as holding a piece of ice in her hand, “a quick and effective way to remind myself of the physicality of my body”), to anyone who is feeling lost in life (existentially or psychically), to the merely curious - Li’s clarity will cut through all these readerly positions and more.
Things in Nature Merely Grow was shortlisted for last year’s Baillie Gifford prize and several prizes in the States (I’m surprised quite honestly it didn’t win any of them), with David Nicholls calling it “the best book I’ve read [in 2025]”. And here’s Ann Patchett (if Ann Patchett is on TikTok, should I be? Don’t answer that unless the answer is no, definitely not.) “It is a book that has not a single spare word in it, that never relies on a cliché, that never resorts to how [Li] is supposed to feel”.
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I couldn’t agree more, I folded down almost every single page of this book -it’s written with such clarity and care, with such an economy of words and is stunning in it’s fierce devotion to truth, to philosophy, to love. If you have it in you to read this book, do. It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve read this decade. I am not the same person I was before I read it.
Like you, I am changed every time, especially by memoirs. You could say 90pct of my personality IS the last book I read.
I have picked this book up and put it down so many times. This has convinced me to actually read and sit with it. Thank you.