Yiyun Li’s memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” stuns with its lucidity and with the nightmarish facts that prompted its ...

And here sat Maureen, who had no one else to send flowers to as sweet revenge. And here sat Lilian, who had thought that ...

Words not only are Li’s guilty pleasure, but are her way to “make some sense out of this senseless life.” For the writer, every book poses different challenges, just as, for a mother, every child does ...

In the second section of the story, we learn that Lilian has recently returned from a trip to Germany with her husband.

In her memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Yiyun Li tries to honor the lives, and accept the unfathomable deaths, of her ...

My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” writes Yiyun Li early in her latest book, Things in Nature Merely Grow ...

Author Yiyun Lee finds a path forward after her sons die by suicide — one at 16, the other at 19. Li lives both in 'an abyss' and in radical acceptance. A review by Vikas Turakhia for the ...

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Yiyun Li's new book is about thinking through the unimaginable. It's a departure from her many short stories and novels, and it's a sequel of sorts to her book about the death ...

Only by writing could the acclaimed novelist Yiyun Li grapple with the suicides of her two sons. But her new book is no ordinary grief memoir. By Alexandra Alter When four police officers arrived ...

In “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Yiyun Li writes from a terrain no one chooses to map.Her spare memoir confronts the suicide of her younger son James in 2024, six years and four months after ...

Yiyun Li’s memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” stuns with its lucidity and with the nightmarish facts that prompted its ...

Yiyun Li’s Unsparing Memoir of Life After Two Sons’ Suicides In Things in Nature Merely Grow, the Chinese-American author writes past grief’s clichés. Jane Hu / June 11, 2025.