Yiyun Li’s memoir is grounded in a personal history with suicidal depression. Before the death of her two sons, James and Vincent, Li had spent years confronting questions of despair, suicide, and survival in both her personal life and her writing. As a result, the memoir is a continuation of a lifelong intellectual inquiry into how a person lives in the presence of suffering. Equally important is Li’s deep engagement with literature and philosophy, which provide the framework through which she interprets her experiences. Together, these personal and literary influences shape the memoir’s distinctive voice, one that rejects sentimentality in favor of clarity, analysis, and direct confrontation with reality.

Li first publicly wrote about her own experiences with severe depression and suicidal ideation in her 2017 book, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. In that work, she discusses two suicide attempts in 2012 and reflects on the psychological and philosophical questions that accompanied them. These experiences establish her intellectual engagement with despair years before the losses of her children. When she writes about Vincent and James in Things in Nature Merely Grow, she is approaching the subject as someone who has personally wrestled with questions of whether life is worth continuing. Rather than seeking simple explanations for her sons’ deaths or portraying them solely as victims of mental illness, Li treats their decisions as complex realities that deserve careful thought and honest examination.

The memoir centers on the suicides of both of her sons: Vincent, who died at 16 in 2017, and James, who died at 19 in 2024. Li states these facts plainly in the opening pages, asserting that they “must be acknowledged before I go on with this book” (4). Her refusal to soften or euphemize these events reflects a perspective shaped by both personal experience and philosophical conviction. Throughout the memoir, she argues that reality must be confronted as it is, not as one wishes it to be. Understanding her history with depression and suicide explains why she rejects many common cultural narratives about grief, healing, and closure. For Li, these narratives often substitute comforting stories for difficult truths. Her memoir instead attempts to construct a framework for living inside an “abyss” (22), a permanent condition created by loss rather than a temporary stage that can be overcome. 

Literature plays an equally important role in this process. Things in Nature Merely Grow exists in conversation with Li’s earlier novel Where Reasons End (2017). Written after Vincent’s death, that novel imagines a dialogue between a mother and her deceased son, creating a space where conversation can continue despite death. In the new memoir, Li repeatedly contrasts that project with her attempt to write about James. Because James was more private and philosophical than Vincent, she concludes that an imagined conversation would not adequately honor him. The memoir therefore becomes an effort to create a different kind of book—one grounded in fact, logic, and reflection rather than imaginative reconstruction.

This personal experience, both with her own suicidal ideation and her attempts at exploring loss through writing, are essential to understanding Things in Nature Merely Grow. Li approaches loss through sustained intellectual engagement. Her background as a writer, reading, and survivor of her own psychological crises allows her to frame her sons’ deaths within larger questions about suffering, meaning, free will, and survival. As a result, the memoir explores how language, literature, and thought can help a person continue living when no explanation can fully account for loss.