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“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes in the opening line of Things in Nature Merely Grow. It’s the same thing a police officer says before delivering the worst possible news: that Li’s son James, a college freshman, has taken his own life. James has followed his brother, Vincent, who died by suicide in 2017, at 16.
Li is the author of two previous memoirs (one that’s partly about her own depression) and six works of fiction (one that’s about Vincent’s death), and she begins to write again, knowing that language falls short. “Words are what I will do for James too, even if I cannot learn a new alphabet and invent a new language, even knowing, right before starting, the inevitability of failing him.” As she makes clear to the reader, Things in Nature Merely Grow is not a memoir about getting past grief: “This book is about life’s extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be. This book will neither ask the questions you may want me to ask nor provide the closure you may expect the book to offer.”
Instead, in this short book of just around 200 pages, Li describes her life as she learns how to keep living in “the abyss” in the months after James’ death. She writes, gardens, keeps silent company with cherished friends. She recounts the shockingly insensitive things other parents say. And she circles back to both sons’ childhoods, as well as her own in Beijing, growing up in the crosshairs of an emotionally abusive mother.
Li also turns to the writers she loves, like William Trevor and Shakespeare, as well as the writers her sons read. As she delves into her sons’ differing personalities and quirks, she recounts the difficult choices involved in parenting two gifted and sensitive children.
This is trying terrain for a reader, as Things in Nature Merely Grow is not an uplifting book. But I marked many striking passages, like this one: “The immediate days after a child’s death (or the death of any loved one, I think) share something with the immediate days after a child’s birth . . . the days go so fast, and maternity leave is over in no time.” Li is a plainspoken, clear-eyed guide to the worst that a parent can endure.