Things in Nature Merely Grow

Yiyun Li opens this memoir with the sentence police detectives use when delivering devastating news: "There is no good way to say this." She heard it twice. In 2017, she already suspected the news. In 2024, she knew it immediately and did not wait for the detective to ask her to sit down. Li and her husband, Dapeng, had two children and lost them both to suicide: Vincent in 2017, at 16, and James in 2024, at 19. Both died near train stations in the Princeton area. Li states these facts without euphemism, arguing that softening the language around death and suicide amounts to cowardice, and that not calling a fact by its name is the beginning of cruelty.

After Vincent died, Li wrote Where Reasons End, a conversation between a mother and her dead child across the border of life and death. Vincent had been verbal, flamboyant, and poetic; Li could conjure his voice because their relationship was built on endless talking. Writing for James presents a fundamentally different challenge. Li's longtime first reader and friend Brigid explains that James is "the antithesis of attention" and that Li will have to "learn a new alphabet." James resisted metaphor, evaded notice, and preferred silence. Li compares him to a fusion of Melville's Bartleby and Shakespeare's Hamlet, and acknowledges that this book will fall short.

Vincent was artistically gifted and intensely sensitive. He wore a pink dress to school in seventh grade to defy potential bullies, wrote poems in fourth grade that his teacher described as astonishingly painful, and once asked Li: "You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well; why did you give birth to us?" James differed in nearly every respect. At six, he told Li the world was "made of dots and squiggly lines." In first grade, he explained that his best skill was not to be noticed by anyone. A neuropsychologist who assessed him in second grade ran out of tests for his mathematics and logic. He taught himself Welsh, German, Romanian, Russian, and other languages.

The brothers were best friends. After visiting the Van Gogh Museum following Vincent's death, Li was struck to learn that Theo van Gogh survived his brother by only six months, a fact that revisited her after James died. She reflects that whatever security the family had built for James must have disintegrated when Vincent died.

Li describes a mother's job as providing a "framework for living": routines that anchor time. She cooked three separate meals nightly, cut apples into geometrically perfect slices for Vincent's lunch box, and shaped pancakes into letters beyond the English alphabet for James. After Vincent's death, she rebuilt this framework, planting herbs for James's omelettes and traveling to new places.

For six years before Vincent's death, Li had lived with a dread that he might choose not to live. His California therapist warned that if Vincent decided to act, it would be sudden and unstoppable. Li carried no such dread for James. Her therapist periodically asked whether James might be suicidal; Li did not think he was. In his final months, James told Li he was rereading Albert Camus's play Caligula "a bit obsessively" and mentioned The Myth of Sisyphus, which opens by declaring suicide the only serious philosophical question. The last time Li saw James, after a dinner at home, he stepped out of the car and raised a hand. Her last words to him were "I love you, James."

After the police left on the night of James's death, Li and Dapeng sat stunned. She called Brigid and asked her to come so they would not "slip into unreality." Unlike after Vincent's death, when she sat up all night, she went to bed, knowing she needed sleep to face the rest of her life.

Li declares she is writing from an abyss, and that if this is where she will live for the rest of her life, it is her habitat. She identifies essential practices for enduring it: sleep, hydration, exercise, reading, writing, and radical acceptance, which she defines as accepting what has happened without pursuing questions of why, how, or what-if. After James's death, she continued working on a novel, took piano lessons, gardened, and studied Euclid's geometry, drawn to its combination of intuition and logic. With Brigid, she developed a habit of distinguishing meaningful questions from trivial ones, calling the small ones "pebbles" to be kicked aside. The true boulder, Li writes, is the unanswerable question: How did this happen?

Li rejects the word "grief," which she believes contemporary culture treats as a process with an endpoint. She warns that this book offers neither closure nor a redemptive arc. She turns instead to Constance's speech in Shakespeare's King John, where grief fills the room of an absent child. Brigid offers a further insight: After Vincent's death, Li was "outside time," which enabled her to write Where Reasons End by meeting Vincent across the border of life and death. After James's death, Li is "outside space," acutely conscious of the shared timeline with the world but profoundly alone in it.

The memoir addresses the responses of others, from compassionate friends to strangers who sent unsolicited manuscripts or religious counsel. Chinese media sensationalized the story, calling Li a murderer of her children. She recounts the most devastating encounter: Weeks after Vincent's death, a mother complained that her daughter had not received a farewell text from Vincent. When Li told her husband, he said it felt as though Vincent had died a second time.

Li discloses her own history. In 2012, she spent three weeks in a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt brought on by a cognitive crisis while weaning from an antidepressant. She reveals a childhood of abuse by her mother, who beat her, invented a game with an imaginary obedient twin to shame her, and prophesied she would die an ugly death. She shared little of this past with her children. Her friend Katherine asks whether Vincent's suicide gave James "a sense of possibility." Li extends the question: Did her own attempts show Vincent that the partition between life and death was not solid?

Li articulates a central distinction: Vincent died from feelings, an acutely sensitive soul who found that a life worth living did not prove livable. James died from thinking, concluding through long reflection that a livable life was not worth the trouble. On the last day of James's winter break, Li told him that only 10 percent of life consists of things and people one loves, and for that 10 percent one must endure the rest. James nodded and gave his gentle smile.

The book closes with Li swimming laps in the university pool, thinking with every stroke about Vincent's bright clothes still in his closet and James's identical jeans packed in a suitcase she cannot unpack. She holds on to facts, their logic and weight. A mother and child, she writes, are like two hands placed next to each other, barely touching or with fingers intertwined. Then the world turns, and one hand is left, holding on to everything and nothing "that is called now and now and now and now" (172).