Things in Nature Merely Grow
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âThere is no good way to say this,â Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.
âThere 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.â
There is no good way to say thisâbecause words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, âa single point in a timeline.â 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: 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, âThe 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.â Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Liâs indomitable spirit.
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Yiyun Li is the author of works of fiction and non-fiction, including Wednesdayâs Child, Where Reasons End, and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her accolades include the Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a Windham-Campbell prize, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship and the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and she was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. She teaches at Princeton University, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
