Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR/AUTOBIOGRAPHY
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography

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.

Shall I Go, Where Causes End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl are among Yiyun Li's works of fiction, as well as the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won numerous accolades, including the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and the Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker's fiction issue 20 Under 40. The New Yorker, A Public Place, The Best American Short Stories, and The O have all published her work. Among other publications, Henry Prize Tales. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and lectures at Princeton University.