One writer’s lost generation

Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li
4th Estate, £16.99, pp192

For several months before the Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li’s new work had a title, she simply referred to it in discussion with friends as “the book for James”, her younger son, just as her novel Where Reasons End (2019) was “the book for Vincent”, her older son. The stark tragedy behind both is that each son died by suicide: Vincent in 2017, aged 16, and James in 2024, aged 19.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I get on with this book; my husband and I had two children and lost them both… both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” Li continues, so the reader should be in no doubt: “This book is about life’s extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be. This book will neither ask the questions you may want me to ask nor provide the closure you expect me to offer.” Yet in Things in Nature Merely Grow (the title taken from Li’s observations of her New Jersey garden, in which plants flourish – or not – “until they die”), while eschewing consolation and conventionality with its lack of demands, its “radical acceptance”, Li has created an exquisite, wrenching memorial to two young, distinct lives.

The poet Anne Sexton wrote in Wanting to Die that “suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.” Literature has long sought to fathom that “special language”: to comprehend, to explain the inexplicable and the (mostly) devastatingly unknowable. Some narratives examine the impact through a cultural or philosophical lens, such as Al Alvarez’s The Savage God and Simon Critchley’s Notes on Suicide; or via personal grief, as in Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Paul Morley’s Nothing. Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast has become a classic of psychiatry. Li herself discussed her own experience of being hospitalised for depression in a memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You In Your Life (2017). She reconnected with the world from this utterly bleak place of isolation in which books and their authors proved sources of sustenance – among them Marianne Moore, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen. During the lockdown of 2020, Li, who teaches creative writing at Princeton (where her son James was an undergraduate when he died), set up Tolstoy Together, a global online reading group, which connected over daily segments of War and Peace. It ran for an incredible 85 days.

Books and ideas were minutely discussed in the Li household, and they walk through this memoir, but the references seem sadder, more austere and uncompromising, maybe because we know the end of the story. Li cites Grief Lessons, Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides (“These ancient Greeks… their grief and their rage are nearly untranslatable, as though feelings in extremity can only be physical sensations”) and the painful, tearing-out-hair monologue of Shakespeare’s character Constance in King John on the loss of her son Arthur. Later, she turns to the ancient Greek geometer Euclid, “who had a more logical mind”.

James, who comes across as linguistically and philosophically curious and wise, was reading Camus towards the end of his life. Afterwards, Li rereads The Myth of Sisyphus to reflect, to perhaps search for clues. She had always been afraid that because she “understood Vincent’s feelings and foresaw the dire outcome of those feelings”, he would not be around to graduate high school. But with James, “I could only reach for his mind without grasping it”. With the “flamboyantly handsome”, endlessly creative and emotionally driven Vincent, Li “advocated for patience, and the possibility for change”. With “calm, dispassionate, self-effacing” James, Li felt that his stoicism would prevail, but ultimately “stoicism could mean that death, like life, could be endured… James died as a result of thinking, not feeling”.

Of the many “what ifs” that arise from such terrible circumstances, Li comments that “wishes are artificial flowers”. Her writing is wonderfully spare; but she does not spare herself, or us. As a writer-practitioner she notes the bleak and unbelievable coincidence of two children dying by suicide (al though statistically, a suicide in the family leaves its other members vulnerable): “Life… does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.” She owes us nothing, and it is therefore with outrage on her behalf to read, amid the unshowy love and support of friends, about the clumsily well-meaning and less well-meaning directives towards her and her husband, of strangers with “unrealistic expectations” and “grief cheapened by cliche”.

As Li knows only too well, “sometimes there is no silver lining in life”. In the chapter Things I Never Told My Children, she recalls growing up in China with an abusive mother, who took out her rage on Li and her sister. “I once got beaten after I received high scores on a school exam, and the reason she supplied this beating was that I looked too smug for her liking when I reported the news.” Li learned early how to control her outward expressions; raising her own boys, she was fully equipped to understand that “a 10-year-old already has the capacity to understand life’s bleakness”. For her sons – “brothers and best friends” – all the ostensibly promising years that lay ahead proved “unliveable”.

How, then, does Li fill this abyss, as she continually describes her existence? “Sleep, hydration, small and frequent snacks, daily exercise” at the first shock. Now (“there is only now and now and now”) writing, reading, teaching, learning piano, swimming, gardening, friendship, travel. “Children die, and their parents go on living” by “marking time”. She explains: “Life is stubborn, and so am I.”

To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it at the same time as desperately wishing that it had never needed to be written at all.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (HarperCollins Publishers, £16.99). Order a copy at observershop.co.uk to receive a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply.

Portrait by Christopher Lane/The Observer