Review: Things in Nature Merely Grow? by Yiyun Li

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Yiyun Li’s boldness in Things in Nature Merely Grow sits with me long after reading, particularly her willingness to grapple with the suicide of her son James without giving in to deep emotional wailing. That kind of emotional outpouring would be entirely valid, and there should be books that approach grief that way. But Li does something different. She examines the loss with method and intention, trying to reach what she calls radical acceptance: there is nothing she can do to undo James’s death, so what can she do to accept and memorialize him?

That question feels even more powerful because James was Li’s second child to die by suicide. She had already lost her son Vincent and written about that loss (Where Reasons End). Now, she has to confront James’s death without pretending that Vincent isn’t already part of her experience as a parent. James and Vincent were part of the same family, and Li cannot write this second book without having written the first. It raises an interesting and one would imagine incredibly hard question for her to grapple with in trying this book: How much does she include Vincent before this stops being a book about James and becomes a book about the deaths of both sons?

Li navigates that balance well. She gives us glimpses of how James showed up in the world, particularly the way he thought. She distinguishes him from Vincent in part by describing James as a person of thinking rather than feeling. We see that in the philosophical conversations they had about meaning and purpose and in Li’s return to conversations that, in retrospect, could have gone differently. But she refuses to turn hindsight into certainty. 

An emotional deluge, however understandable, could have made this primarily a book about Li’s grief: the absence of James rather than James himself. Instead, she creates space for us to know him in whatever glimpses we can. She respects him as a person who struggled with meaning and purpose and engages seriously with the person he was. The philosophical explorations therefore feel appropriate rather than abstract. In many ways, it feels like Li is trying to write the book James himself would want to read.

She can recognize moments when she could have asked another question without pretending that asking it would necessarily have changed anything. There is an impossibility to knowing what was coming down the road or what would be the right calculus to save James. Li ponders what questions might have opened up new avenues of keeping James connected but she does not linger or lament. That refusal is particularly powerful because it is incredibly hard to maintain, given the care and love the also comes through in Li's words.

I appreciate that Li refuses to publicly litigate questions of responsibility or guilt. She acknowledges the outside scrutiny surrounding her family, but she doesn’t spend the book defending herself as a parent. There’s no winning down that road. No amount of explaining could satisfy everyone, and doing so would take attention away from being present with the deaths of her children. Refusing it struck me as both an act of bravery and an act of self-care. More importantly, it keeps the focus on James.

Things in Nature Merely Grow is not salvation literature. Li isn’t writing as though this book could retrospectively save James, or even necessarily save another person who reads it. Writing cannot undo what happened. What it can do is preserve something of him.

The title, a comment from James that Li uses, captures the complexity of what Li is saying with this book. James’s contemplation that things in nature merely grow while people “grow up” raises questions about what growing up meant to him and whether he was ready to deal with it. But it also contrasts painfully with Li, who never gets to see either of her children grow up. Their deaths, instead, require more growth from her. She has to learn how to hold their presence forever in her life as a parent alongside their absence forever in her life as a parent.

Li cannot resolve that contradiction. What she can do (and what I found so compelling about this book) is sit with it, deliberately and without sensationalizing it.

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