No parent should ever have to outlive their children. Unfortunately, Yiyun Li and her husband, lost both their sons. Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, and James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide.

In Things in Nature Merely Grow (published by HarperCollins India), Yiyun Li makes the case for “radical acceptance”. Reality which can be conveyed in many ways, is better spoken in the most straightforward language. Over and over again, she refers to the facts that one gathers. It is a fact. The emotional quotient is not necessarily addressed or considered sufficiently signifcant to be mentioned in the book. In fact, she says, while addressing the reader very early on in the book, if you think suicide is too depressing a subject; if the fact that all things insoluble in life remain insoluble is too bleak for you; and if you prefer that radical acceptance remain a foreign concept to you, this is a good time to stop reading. (p.25). To live after these events in her life, almost as she recognises worthy of a Greek tragedy, requires the radical acceptance that she suggests. It is the only way to live each day. She relies upon the garden metaphor. In fact, she was encouraged to take up garderning by William Trevor.

I’ve come to understand Trevor’s point: gardening is good training for a novelist. One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one’s visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life, too. Would it have changed Vincent a little, had he had the opportunity to work on the garden with me for a season, several seasons? Better stop asking these questions that tread in the realm of alternatives — whatever the answer is doesn’t make a difference in this life.

And one must garden as realistically as one lives after the deaths of one’s children. One must, especially, refrain from giving the flowers and plants metaphorical or symbolic meaning beyond nature’s mere way of being.

(p.79-80)

Things in Nature Merely Grow is a moving tribute by Yiyun Li to her second son, James. It is also a meditation on grief by a parent who is hurting and oddly enough a manual for mourners, on how to offer their condolences to the bereaved family.

Interestingly enough, David Nicholls wrote about it on his Instagram account too. I replied to him. Not only he, but Helen Fielding too ( author of Bridget Jones Diary) liked my response. 

Read it.

Yiyun Li is the author of ten books, including The Book of Goose, which received the PEN/Faulkner Award; Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, PEN/Malamud Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, among other honours. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.

29 May 2025