Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

In July, we will be discussing the book, Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li.

The book is a quietly devastating, deeply philosophical memoir written from an abysmal place of loss, nested within a rigorous exploration of language, memory, and the limits of human grief.

Refusing conventional narratives of healing or closure, this work is both an intimate tribute to two lost lives and an incisive, steely look at what it means to survive the unimaginable.

🏆 Accolades:

Winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography Winner of the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

• Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

----------------------------------------------------------

The Story

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the very opening of the 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 16, James in 2024, at 19. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

Following her previous book Where Reasons End—which imagined a dialogue with her eldest son, Vincent—Things in Nature Merely Grow focuses deeply on navigating life after the death of her youngest son, James. Where Vincent was verbal and flamboyant, James was a brilliant, autistic prodigy who spoke at least eight languages, read Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, and preferred silence.

To write about James, Li notes that she has to "learn a new alphabet." She masterfully distinguishes between the two losses: Vincent died from feelings, an acutely sensitive soul for whom life did not prove livable; James died from thinking, concluding through deep philosophical reflection that a livable life was simply not worth the trouble.

Rather than seeking a redemptive arc, Li chronicles the daily, concrete routines that anchor her to the world—cooking, gardening