Li's new book is a memoir of radical acceptance about loss, motherhood, and the limitations of language

Writing about Yiyun Li's new memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is hard, not only because of its difficult subject, but also because the book, a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award and longlisted for the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, itself interrogates the inadequacy of language to express the nature of life and loss.

"There is no good way to say this," opens the memoir, with the words spoken by the police who have come to inform Li and her husband that their teenage son has died by suicide. Li has heard these very same words once before, after the death of their first son. Vincent died by suicide, aged 16, in 2017; James, also by suicide, aged 19, in 2024.

The double loss of children -- unfathomable, incommunicable -- is at the heart of this austere and deeply felt work. Li notes that while talking about painful topics, people often reach for cliché, euphemism, or even, sometimes, metaphor itself, as a screen or for self-deception, anything to avoid getting too close to the open sore, the "never-healing wound."

Living with an extremity

Yet such language inevitably fails. She is unsparing about this tendency: "The world, it seems to me, is governed by strong conviction and paltry imagination and meagre understanding." Noting that words like "aching," "wrenching," and "shattering" are completely inadequate to express her situation -- "all wrong words, useless in their familiarity" -- she reflects on how to proceed. "There is no good way to say this: words fall short."

Nevertheless, language is her tool of choice as a writer; words are her work; and therefore, words will have to serve the purpose.

"If one has to live with the extremity of losing two children, an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune." And so she will have to construct the sentences, to talk not only about death, but also life after the death of children: "the only way I can make some sense out of this senseless life."

Literature, where words live, offers moments of deep feeling. Li turns to Greek plays and Shakespearean tragedies, where grief is expressed in a high pitch of rage and despair. She hears the cries of Euripides's Hekabe, the howls of Lear, and the desolate clarity of Edgar's words: "The worst is not/So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'"

Thinking of a happy moment from her sons' Oakland childhood, Li remembers the words of Dante: "Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost."

As she makes the effort to give structure to every day, she recalls Philip Larkin: "Where can we live but days?"

Unflinching gaze

With forensic precision and a clear, unflinching gaze, Li focuses on facts: "Necessity dictates that attention should be given to all details." She structures her days and weeks, but the vastness of her loss remains. She begins to read Euclid and Wittgenstein, works on her garden, and learns to play the piano. "And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies."

Time itself becomes the boulder for the Sisyphean task of just living every day: "One carries it from morning to night." Time is the endless present: "There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now and now." Li's words are spare and austere, in keeping with the lines from Marianne Moore that are read at her son's memorial: "The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;/not in silence, but in restraint."

This is not a conventional "grief memoir" with a tidy narrative arc from loss and pain to healing and redemption. There is no catharsis, and no easy resolution. Some wounds do not close. Li notes this in plain, simple words: "I am in an abyss."

In a powerful image she describes grief as an infant that she carries in her arms, one who refuses to nurse, and refuses to fall asleep, but only cries and cries. And thus when she gardens, it is with the recognition that this means nothing beyond the simple act of tending to the plants. "My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration." With utter clarity, in words that form the title of the memoir, she notes that this is because "things in nature merely grow, until it is time for them to die."

Nevertheless, even in the abyss, if grief grows, "it will grow like a volunteer rose campion or a sweet violet or a columbine." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a memoir of radical acceptance about loss, motherhood, and the limitations of language.

Assistance for overcoming suicidal thoughts is available on these 24x7 helplines: KIRAN 1800-599-0019, Aasra 9820466726.

The reviewer is in the IAS.

Things in Nature Merely Grow Yiyun Li4th Estate/HarperCollins₹599

In an abyss | Review of Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li