Review by Kevin Brown
Yiyun Li’s memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is a meditation on the suicide of her youngest son, James, who died at the age of nineteen. That death took place a bit over six years after the suicide of her older son, Vincent. This book is not an attempt to explain why James made the same decision as his older brother or to come to any sort of understanding of what Li and/or her husband could have done differently. Li is clear that speculation doesn’t do her or her husband or her sons any good at all. Instead, as the title of one of her chapters says, “Children Die, and Parents Go on Living.” One of the threads that runs through this book is the idea that she must take life as she finds it, not as it might have been.
One of the other main ideas is that of the abyss, which is where Li and her husband now find themselves. She reflects on the idea of grief and how some people view it as something one gets through, an idea that seems to repulse Li. She sees it as an insult to the dead if, at some point, she were to believe she has gotten through grief, dusted herself off, and gone back to life. Instead, she believes that she now lives in the abyss and will always live there, that the grief is simply a part of her life and that she will always shape herself around.
It might strike readers as odd, then, that Li talks about how she behaved after her son’s death, as she had a piano lesson days after receiving the news, in addition to her continuing her work writing a novel and teaching. If someone didn’t know her well, if they were only looking at the outside, it would seem her son’s death hadn’t affected her. However, as Li uses her title to remind readers, her way of dealing with grief is to continue doing what she loves and what makes her who she should be, just as nature will continue to grow, whatever happens in the world.
Li’s approach to grief is not one that some readers will share, which is all the more reason for them to read her book. We can never understand how others sustain themselves when such tragedy strikes their lives, but works such as Li’s provide an insight into at least one person’s way of processing such suffering. Reading such a work should provide us with more empathy not only for Li, but for ourselves and others, especially when we deal with grief and loss in ways others might not understand.
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
