Yiyun Li’s Unsparing Memoir of Life After Two Sons’ Suicides

“There is no good way to say this,” begins Yiyun Li’s new memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow. It is what the police officers lead with after Li’s elder son, Vincent, takes his life, and it is the same line she reaches for almost seven years later when her younger son, James, also takes his. It’s an apt first sentence for a book about loss that would seem incommunicable. While not necessarily a “good” line, it appears the only available one here—opening the jacket copy and an excerpt in The New Yorker and now this review. I admit: There seems to be no good way to introduce Li’s story except to quote it again. Though averse to cliché, Li nonetheless finds the phrase both “accurate and effective.” Early in the memoir, she repeats it, with minor variation:

There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on with this book. 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; James near Princeton Station, Vincent near Princeton Junction.

The economy with which Li recounts these data points exemplifies her approach throughout the book. Having lost both her children, the author is not interested in mincing words. Things in Nature Merely Grow is at once blunt and cutting—sparing no one, and least of all Li herself.

Li, who left China in 1996 and now writes in her “adopted language” of English, doesn’t immediately appear to struggle with inarticulacy. Though she came to the United States to study immunology, Li, who is now 52, has since written five novels, three short story collections, and two memoirs. If anything, one might be more struck by her capacity to metabolize painful experiences so swiftly into words. In the months following Vincent’s suicide, she wrote Where Reasons End—a novel staged as a dialogue between a mother and her dead son, that emerged, she recalls in the new book, “without any conscious planning.” One night, while reading an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, Li comes across the arch greeting “Mother dear”—something Vincent would say—and with those words, “the book arrived, opening with that phrase.” Li describes the act of writing Where Reasons End as almost intuitive, conjuring her son through feeling. But if “the book for Vincent,” as she calls it, came to her with relative ease, “the book for James” presents a different story. Unlike his older brother—a talkative child who claimed “adjectives and adverbs” as his “guilty pleasure”—James has a voice that proves more recalcitrant. For months after his death, Li finds she “cannot conjure him up in any manner.”

The reader senses how Li wishes to invent an entirely new vocabulary for James—one that might capture both his linguistic talents (he knew Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Welsh, German, Romanian, and Russian) as well as his logical mind, capable of envisioning abstract dimensions that exceeded the verbal. “Words fall short,” Li confesses, especially after a catastrophe. But this has rarely stopped the writer from trying: “if one has to live with the extremity of losing two children,” she continues, “an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune.” That Li suspects her book for James will inevitably fail him does not release her from attempting to write it. Words not only are Li’s guilty pleasure, but are her way to “make some sense out of this senseless life.”

For the writer, every book poses different challenges, just as, for a mother, every child does. Li recalls Vincent, who lived “flamboyantly and demandingly,” as having been expressive from an early age. He was, in the Chinese phrase, “prone to feelings.” But James, despite his proficiencies with language, was comparatively reticent—the “antithesis of attention,” as Li’s friend puts it. (And after Vincent’s death, Li observes, he grew even more silent.) How should a person speak on behalf of someone who would prefer not to speak for themselves? James’s book required a different framing: Instead of a fictionalized conversation, Things in Nature Merely Grow is narrated in the mother’s first-person voice—a memoir told through Li’s unflinching gaze alone.

James’s presence in the book is sparse and muted. He appears throughout the memoir characteristically withdrawn, receding even as he is introduced. We first hear from James on the last page of the second chapter, when he voices a mere monosyllable. As Li tells it, the summer before James left for college, “he confessed that he had done little in his senior year of high school but read five major works of Wittgenstein.” This sentiment seems, like James himself, the pinnacle of understatement. On her son’s recommendation, the Prince­ton professor begins to read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a short, dense book in which Wittgenstein presents a series of numbered propositions that seek to show how philosophy problems are ultimately problems of language. Li soon admits to James that she is struggling to grasp the text: “Oh, he replied with a single word, which could mean, not surprising, or, how could you not understand Wittgenstein, or, I don’t know what I can do to help you, or, simply read on.”

James’s “Oh”—like a hole of uncertain depth or the number zero—is a puzzle; his response reflects both intense concision and intense unknowability. Such indeterminacy, however, offers Li comfort following his death, in knowing that “James found philosophical pleasure in language.” If the book for Vincent was written from feeling, then the “impossible task” of writing for James “will have to be done through thinking,” Li concludes. “That is how I will reach for an approximation of understanding James,” she continues, “Or of not understanding him—just as I might spend my days reading Wittgenstein, not knowing if I’ve gotten anything right.” Like the Tractatus, Li’s memoir repeatedly confronts the limitations of language in order to accept that she will only ever approximate an understanding of her son’s life, or his reasons for ending it. Writing for James becomes, for the mother, a version of reading for James—a labor she undertakes without any certainty she will succeed.

In fact, it is by acknowledging James’s ultimate opacity that Li can turn to what she does know. Catastrophes often trigger a tide of counterfactual reasoning and rationalization. But the only thing Li seems certain of is that “the questions of whys and hows and wherefores or the wishful thinking of what-ifs” are perilous in this case. Any attempts at speculation too “easily slip into the realm of alternatives”—which is to say that of fiction. For now, the fiction writer can only grasp the situation by first accepting the reality that “James, like Vincent, chose death.” Things in Nature Merely Grow proceeds from this incontrovertible fact.

A few days after James’s death, Li “half-jokingly” tells a friend about her plans to “write a self-help book about radical acceptance,” a concept from psychotherapy that counsels accepting—totally and without judgment—that which one cannot control. While Li’s writing eschews the banalities of pop psychology, there’s something acutely therapeutic about her memoir, whose title blooms from time spent in her garden. Rejecting the trite platitudes offered to her as consolation, Li seeks refuge instead in her roses, hyacinths, tulips, and more—flowers that do not function as symbols for hope or regeneration, but which merely “live until they die.” Plants keep Li tethered to reality alongside the reality of her sons’ deaths: They are “placeholders,” she writes, a way of marking time. When Li finds her mind slipping, she revisits beloved texts (War and Peace, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Montaigne’s essays) that bring her back to herself. She also turns to other writers’ autobiographies as manuals for living, even if none of them can summon “the abyss in the precise way that I’ve experienced it.” Other people’s sentences can be placeholders, too.

But if reading memoirs is already a kind of therapeutic practice, Li takes the trope one step further by writing her own. Things in Nature Merely Grow can be read as a literary person’s self-help book—one that draws from texts as unorthodox as the Tractatus and Euclid’s mathematical treatises. And when words fail Li—as they inevitably do—the garden is always there. Her memoir offers a startlingly practical approach to grieving even as it deconstructs grief’s clichés. She often takes therapeutic terms such as “self-help” and “radical acceptance” so literally as to defamiliarize them. “Do things that work,” becomes a mantra after James’s death—one of the few phrases she has retained from Marsha Linehan’s dialectical behavioral therapy manual. Here, for Li, are some things that work:

sleep, hydration, small and frequent snacks, daily exercise. Get out of bed at the regular time and never ruminate while lying in bed. Make the effort to brew good coffee in the morning. Read—one act of Shakespeare is good enough, so is a page of Euclid’s geometry, a chapter of Henry James’s biography, or one poem from Wallace Stevens’s collection. Write—there is no reason to stop working and there is also no reason to strive for regular working hours. Anything that prevents agitation or rumination is good for the mind.

Also on that list: “writing, teaching, gardening, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry.” Meditative and repetitive, Li’s sentences compel the reader to feel the weight of her minutes, hours, days. She writes: “There is no rush, as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James.” This is prose, one might say, that marks time—and metabolizes feeling—by way of thinking.

Documenting the quotidian facts of life without her sons moves Li toward accepting their deaths more than the commonplaces that usually accompany catastrophe: as “unspeakable pain,” “senseless tragedy,” “unthinkable loss.” These phrases represent, for her, lazy and rote thinking, bad logic. Likewise, Li avoids the words “grieving” and “mourning,” because they suggest processes that end. Part of Li’s challenge in the memoir is to write against clichés toward a more precise—less teleological—articulation of where she finds herself. “I don’t want an end point to my sorrow,” she insists. “What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?”

Things in Nature Merely Grow moves between self-exposure and retreat. Li states unadorned truths and then wraps herself in more philosophical conjectures. She practices acceptance, punctuated with speculation; she wants to ask James questions even as she acknowledges that he’s already given her all the answers he can. In doing so, Li’s memoir, following Where Reasons End, stages a different kind of conversation: not between mother and son, but between the author and herself. Here, the dialogue is inevitably one-sided. Asides, snippets, and interrupting thoughts amount to a list of things Li wished she had asked James: what he thought of Vronsky’s suicide attempt in Anna Karenina, for instance, or Albert Camus’s philosophical text The Myth of Sisyphus, which James was rereading only weeks before his death. Li wishes all these things, before reminding herself that wish is a “weak, useless word.”

In Li’s marked shuttling between fact and speculation, her memoir performs a kind of magic trick that only brutally honest writing can: It provides a sense of James from a distance, mediated through imperfect language, an approximation of intimacy without invasiveness. One of the few things James is imagined to say—throughout the book—is that single word, “Oh.” In the wake of his death, Li considers variations of the sentence from Camus’s play Caligula: “Men die; and they are not happy.” (One milder permutation is: “Men die; and they are happy.” Though the line can also take on epic proportions: “Gods don’t die; and they are not happy.”) Li wonders what James might have thought about her thought experiment: “Most possibly he would have replied with that single word, ‘oh,’ meaning, you’re overthinking, or you’re going down the wrong path, or, let us each read and philosophize on our own, or simply, please leave me alone.” At another moment, she imagines what James might say regarding her struggles in writing this book for him, and comes up with, again, a list of possible interpretations of “Oh.” Here, Li approaches her son not unlike a well-loved character in fiction, whose interior life is expansive and interminable because, ultimately, unknowable.

How do you write a book for your dead son? How do you write two? This is as much a crisis of genre as anything. Presented as nonfiction, Things in Nature Merely Grow is nevertheless invested in the interplay between fact and fiction that animates all Li’s work. Because Where Reasons End is a novel, neither its narrator nor the deceased son, Nikolai, needs bear the weight of the real. But Li’s “impossible task” of writing this book for James requires routing his story—the facts of his life—through her own. In 2017, she published Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life, about her hospitalization following two suicide attempts. In the new memoir, she spends still more time retreading that personal history with depression than interrogating her son’s. Through language, however imperfect, Li enacts the precarious—you might even say maternal—act of trying to protect the autonomy and dignity of James’s personhood at the risk of her own exposure.

The latest book poses hazards for Li precisely because of how much she seems to resemble James: cerebral, logical, private. “Like James,” she explains, “I prefer to live by thinking.” Li’s writing has marshaled her guardedness to good effect: People talk, and she listens. But this mode of relating with strangers doesn’t come without strain: In appearing like a solicitous cipher for other people’s stories, Li is laden with the baggage of their projections and grievances. In her recent New Yorker story, “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies,” the protagonist Lilian (an obvious echo of Li) describes herself as a frequent “captive audience. People who knew her little tended to see in her a sympathetic listener, taking her quietness as attentiveness, viewing her questions—asked only to deflect people’s questions about her—as an invitation.” You can sense, in Li’s new book, the author trying to unload some of this baggage by way of return to sender.

Where Reasons End draws its title and epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Argument”—a reference to Vincent’s love for dialogue and debate. But Things in Nature Merely Grow might be read alongside “One Art,” Bishop’s poem about “the art of losing,” which, she famously concludes, is “not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” That Li deems her book for James a failure is a judgment not rooted in fact, but necessity. Still: Li will try to write it, turning over the same scenes, the same phrases, the same questions—asked, unasked, left, lost, and unanswered. “Writing is hard,” she admits, “but living is harder.”

Wittgenstein famously describes his Tractatus as a ladder that you throw out from under yourself after having climbed up it—its work achieved in your acceptance that you will never truly understand its contents. That is the point. Li’s memoir unspools an analogous paradox: By the end, one grasps the mother’s radical acceptance of the fact that she will never attain a complete understanding of her son, and grasps it through her luminous—but limited—language. That is also the point.