Things in Nature Merely Grow
Things in Nature Merely Grow
Things in Nature Merely Grow
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Description
Description
Yiyun Li's remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.
"There is no good way to say this," Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. "There 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." There is no good way to say this--because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a timeline." 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: "doing the things that work," 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, "The 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." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li's indomitable spirit.
About the Author
About the Author
Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction--Wednesday's Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers--and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Writers like to acknowledge the poverty of language, usually as we screw up the courage to try something fancy with it. Hordes of us are out there hoping to say the unsayable. Not Li. When she writes that 'words fall short, ' she means it: the one stock phrase she likes is 'there is no good way to say this.' The power of Things in Nature Merely Grow resides in her refusal to pay obeisance to words."
--Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine
--Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times "Li does not shy away from the magnitude of these losses. Instead, she writes of radical acceptance, offering a profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children."
--Shannon Carlin, TIME "Things in Nature Merely Grow is an impossible book, yet through Li's deftness and determination she transforms the book into an intricate and nonlinear portrait of loss and love."
--Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books (Must-Read Books of May) "These pages--refreshingly absent of euphemism, platitudes, false optimism, or an ounce of self-pity--provide something far more useful: a vision of maternal grief that is both brutally honest and, ultimately, survivable."
-- Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily "Li manages the near impossible in a complex memoir that is as devastating as it is searingly insightful into the contours of grief and acceptance, recommended for anyone who is navigating the nonlinear timeline of loss."
--Greta Rainbow, Bustle (Best New Books of Spring)
"Li recounts both boys' lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each . . . Readers who've dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here."
--Publishers Weekly
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub date:
2025-05-20
Length:
192 pages
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