Yiyun Li’s newest memoir opens with a sentence no one wants to hear: there is no good way to say this. From that bare fact, she builds a book that looks directly at the unimaginable. After losing her sons Vincent in 2017 at sixteen and James in 2024 at nineteen, Li turns to the only tools that have ever carried her through: words, reasoning, gardening, reading, and the quiet habits that keep a person upright when time itself feels broken. Things in Nature Merely Grow is not a traditional grief manual. It is a stark, disciplined act of attention that tries to let two boys be exactly who they were and are, without the distortions that so easily settle around tragedy.
What the Book Is About
The premise sounds simple: hold the facts, refuse euphemism, keep the verb to be alive for those who are gone. In practice, that means Li stays with what can be known and named, and she resists the common narratives that smooth grief into a story with a lesson at the end. She writes, gardens, studies Wittgenstein and Camus, learns the piano, and insists on living thinkingly alongside death. The book’s title becomes a principle. In nature, growth is not a metaphor. A plant does not argue with the soil or bargain with the weather. It tries to live. Li does the same.
Stylistically, she is precise and spare. Her sentences are clean and careful, yet they carry heat. The vocabulary is rich but never showy, a signature many readers already love from her fiction and essays. The effect is paradoxical: emotional force arriving through restraint.
Key Themes: Fact, Visibility, and the Shape of a Mind
Several recurring ideas give the book its spine.
- Facts as mercy. Li returns to the discipline of naming. Not calling a fact by its name, she argues, can be the beginning of cruelty. That stance extends to how she writes about each son. Vincent and James are not symbols. They are particular and irreducible.
- The loneliness of giftedness. A reader’s note captures it well: being high functioning can feel isolating. Li shows children who see through adult consolations, who balk at the rituals of fitting in. A self-made kindergarten sign that reads, “I’m not talking because I don’t want to,” is both funny and piercing. The refusal to perform is a kind of early integrity that does not always meet a welcoming world.
- Thinking and feeling. The book dwells in intellect, and some readers bristle at its coolness. Others find that very coolness honest. Li is a writer who processes by thinking. She refuses to pretend otherwise. Her argument is not that feeling can be bypassed, but that for some minds, precision is a form of care.
- Radical acceptance without performance. Li’s acceptance is not a posture. It is the acknowledgment that language cannot make death behave, and that repeating a fact does not empty it of pain.
What Different Readers Are Seeing
- The admiring take
Many readers praise the book’s clarity and moral courage. They see a mother refusing to sentimentalize her sons or her sorrow. They value the way Li protects privacy while insisting on the boys’ exact selves. For them, this is one of the most beautiful examinations of loss in recent memory, remarkable for how it holds love and precision in the same hand. - The critical take
Other readers struggle with the book’s intellectual emphasis. They want explicit engagement with depression or clinical language that names illness and treatment paths. They find the emphasis on intellect exasperating, even alienating, and they hear in certain lines a hierarchy that grates. If you come to this memoir seeking therapeutic protocols or a warm, collective we, you may not find it. - The middle reading
A third camp notes both truths. The prose is exquisite and exact. It is also emotionally demanding. The book invites you to meet it where it stands rather than where you might wish it would go. For those willing to sit with that invitation, the reward is a kind of hard-won steadiness that refuses either despair or easy consolation.
Craft Notes: How Li Makes It Work
- Voice: Controlled, lucid, and unflinching. The restraint amplifies the ache.
- Structure: A sequence of meditations rather than a linear narrative. Moments in the garden sit beside philosophical reflections and vivid memories of the boys.
- Ethic: Privacy respected, specificity honored. Li names what is hers to name and leaves the rest outside the frame.
- Imagery: Gardens, growth, and the ordinary tasks that keep a body moving. The metaphors are domestic, not grand.
A Small Controversy
One reader flags a tension: Li states her wish to keep family matters private in interviews, yet later recounts a visitor’s story about encountering a celebrity in a psychiatric ward. For some, that anecdote feels like needless name-dropping that violates the privacy standard the book sets elsewhere. It is a brief moment, but worth noting if you are attuned to questions of consent on the page.
Who This Book Is For
- Readers of memoir who value intellectual rigor as much as lyrical grace.
- Anyone navigating loss who does not want a five-step plan, but a companion that honors the full weight of fact.
- Fans of Li’s earlier works on grief and mental health, including Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End.
What You Will Carry Away
- Permission to live in the present tense. Li’s insistence on was and is, held together, gives language a way to keep loving without erasure.
- Respect for different grief grammars. Not everyone heals by talking more or by turning feelings into lessons. For some, precision is love.
- A deeper sense of the ordinary as salvation. Plants to water, keys to practice, pages to read. The smallest habits can anchor the largest storms.
My Take
Things in Nature Merely Grow is fierce in its quiet. It is not a comfort blanket, and it is not trying to be. Instead, it is a clear window, polished with care, through which you can see a mother keeping vigil for her sons by telling the truth about them. If you need a book that makes sorrow legible without softening it, this one will stay with you.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Ready to read it and decide for yourself
Buy Things in Nature Merely Grow on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4qbg3vl
