Yiyun Li’s 2025 memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is a work of creative nonfiction that explores the author’s grief after the suicides of her two sons: 16-year-old Vincent in 2017 and 19-year-old James in 2024. In the aftermath of this second, unforeseen tragedy, Li attempts to construct a framework for living within what she terms the “abyss” of her new reality, a permanent state that defies conventional narratives of healing. The memoir continues a public and literary inquiry Li began in her earlier works, including the 2017 memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, which detailed her own history with suicidal depression, and the 2019 novel Where Reasons End, an imagined dialogue with her son Vincent after his death.

A recipient of numerous literary honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, Li approaches her subject with philosophical rigor. The memoir documents her deliberate rejection of the U.S. cultural vocabulary of mourning, turning instead to logic, literature, and the disciplined practice of “radical acceptance” to navigate her circumstances. She explores themes of Intellectual Engagement as an Alternative to Grief, Radical Acceptance of Facts, and The Search for Reasons to Live.

This guide refers to the 2025 Farrar, Straus and Giroux first edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death by suicide, suicidal ideation, child death, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and mental illness.

Summary

The writer Yiyun Li begins her memoir with the stark, unalterable facts that define her existence: Her two sons, Vincent and James, have both died by suicide. Vincent died in 2017 at 16, and James in 2024 at 19, both near train stations in Princeton, New Jersey. This book is Li’s attempt to write for James, a task she finds difficult because he was a quiet, private child who resisted attention, unlike his flamboyant older brother, Vincent, for whom she was able to write the fictional dialogue Where Reasons End. Li frames her reality as an abyss, a new habitat she did not choose but must now occupy. Rejecting the clichés of grief, she sets out to navigate this extremity through radical acceptance—an unflinching acknowledgment of facts—and a philosophical inquiry into her sons’ lives, their deaths, and her own survival. She warns readers seeking inspiration or tidy narratives of healing to look elsewhere; this is an exploration of insoluble questions from a place where no parent wishes to be.

Li reflects on the years leading up to her first loss, detailing the six years of dread she felt about her elder son, Vincent. Her intuition told her he might not live, a fear shared by his therapist. Vincent is remembered as a brilliantly artistic and deeply feeling child, a perfectionist who once wore a pink dress to school to call attention to his differences and who protested when Li edited adjectives from his writing. His death occurred just hours after the family put a deposit on a new house, a home he had been excited to help design and where he planned to bake and garden. In the aftermath, Li creates a framework for living for herself, her husband, and James, one that holds the space of Vincent’s absence. She also writes a book for Vincent, a fictionalized continuation of their endless conversations, which gives his friends solace that Vincent is back. This period establishes a new, fractured reality, one where Li learns to parent her living son while in constant communion with her dead one.

This fragile framework shatters with the second, more shocking death. James, who had just started his freshman year at Princeton University, dies in the same manner as his brother. James is portrayed as Vincent’s opposite: logical, reserved, and intensely private. He was a boy who read Wittgenstein for pleasure, set his phone to Lithuanian to maintain his privacy, and whose quiet demeanor concealed a powerful intellect. In their last conversation, James tells his mother he is rereading Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, a work that opens by calling suicide a philosophical question. Shortly after, when the police deliver the news, Li’s world collapses into a new, more absolute abyss. This second loss moves her beyond a fractured timeline into a state she describes as a deep and lonely dislocation from the rest of humanity.

To survive this new reality, Li develops a rigorous intellectual and philosophical practice. She rejects the term “grieving,” which she sees as a process with an expected end point, and instead embraces her sorrow as a permanent condition. She learns to distinguish between “pebbles”—small, self-pitying, or useless thoughts—and the unmovable “boulder” of her loss, a Sisyphus-like burden she must coexist with, not conquer. Her days become structured by activities she calls “placeholders,” actions that mark time without demanding emotional interpretation. She practices piano exercises from Charles-Louis Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist because it requires focus without feeling. This commitment to mundane tasks is how she builds a habitat within the abyss, living by logic and disciplined thought when feeling is unbearable.

Li then examines her understanding of her sons’ distinct motivations. She believes Vincent, who lived through his feelings, found life worth living but ultimately unlivable because of its inability to meet his standards for beauty and perfection. James, who lived through his thoughts, likely found life perfectly livable but concluded it was not worth living. She recalls telling James that one must endure the difficult 90% of life for the 10% of joy, a ratio she now fears was insufficient for both her sons. Ultimately, Li is resolved to respect her sons’ choices, however painful, as acts of free will born from their deeply considered, albeit different, inner worlds.

Li connects her current state to her own traumatic childhood in China, where she was subjected to her mother’s unpredictable and violent rages. This experience of abuse forged her into someone who learned to protect an inner part of herself from the world. She and her husband resolved to be better parents, creating a safe cocoon for their children. Now, she questions whether this protection left her sons without the grim resilience she was forced to develop. She also catalogs the clumsy, cruel, and self-serving responses of others to her tragedy, which she views as minor comedies that underscore the world’s inability to meet her reality. She honors the friends who can sit with her in the starkness of her life without offering platitudes.

The memoir concludes with Li settled in her permanent state of being. She is a mother who can no longer mother, coexisting with the void left by her children. This book, written for James, is itself a placeholder, a construction of thought and logic that she knows must ultimately fail to capture his essence. The concrete facts of her sons’ final moments—Vincent’s cracked phone, James’s pencil broken in two—are the solid points she holds onto. They are the unadorned, unchangeable truths in the abyss she now calls home, where she will live, every single day, for the rest of her life, by thinking.