Things in Nature Merely Grow: Memoir of 'Harsh Beauty' After Loss

Things in Nature Merely Grow: memoir of 'harsh beauty' after loss

The Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li begins her "quietly devastating" memoir by "laying out the facts", said Suzanne Joinson in The Guardian."And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering." Li and her husband had two sons, Vincent and James. Vincent died in 2017, aged 16; James died in 2024, aged 19. Both ended their lives by jumping in front of trains not far from the family home in New Jersey.Both were academically gifted, but had very di…

Accepting the Abyss in "Things in Nature Merely Grow" - Chicago Review of Books

Yiyun Li’s new work Things in Nature Merely Grow is a hard book to review, but not a hard one to feel. This book, a story told in a mere 192 pages, attempts (and, to me, succeeds) to sit in the abyss that is loss—an abyss that all of us will face one way or another, sooner or later. It’s a hard book to review because of the scope of its efforts, because of the poignancy in which it cuts so purely to its point: that people die, and people keep on…