Jessi Jezewska Stevens
With a heartbreaking book of “facts and logic,” Yiyun Li memorializes her son on his own terms.
Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 172 pages, $26
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Grief memoirs claim special license to lamenting the medium in which they must proceed. “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning,” Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), the contemporary paradigm for the genre. In Sloane Crosley’s recent Grief Is for People (2024), the author likewise finds language a paltry companion in the void: “I am disgusted by the universal truths of grief, by the platitudes.” Grief is shatteringly specific. Language threatens its reduction to cliché.
Things in Nature Merely Grow, by the celebrated Chinese American author Yiyun Li, is not a grief memoir, but a book of “facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.” It is dedicated to Li’s son, James, a child prodigy who once studied linguistics at Princeton University. A young man of few words, yet fluent in at least eight languages, James was the kind of teenager who spent his senior year of high school reading the collected works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a famously rigorous analysis of the shortcomings of language.
Things in Nature is a book of facts and logic because it is an attempt to memorialize James on his own terms, as he would have liked, through “thinking rather than feeling.” As in a mathematical proof, Li begins with first premises: she will proceed from a place of “radical acceptance” some won’t be able to stomach. She advises such readers to set this book—and, by corollary, this review—aside.
For the facts to be faced are frankly unimaginable.
“There is no good way to say this,” reads the first line, a phrase borrowed from the cops who arrive at Li’s doorstep bearing the awful news. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”
Li’s 2019 novel, Where Reasons End, is dedicated to Vincent, a flamboyant social butterfly who harbored literary aspirations; we learn in Things in Nature Merely Grow that he long struggled with suicidal ideation. In that earlier book, a boy named Nikolai argues with his mother from beyond the grave about literature, language (Nikolai is for adverbs; the mother, for nouns), and poetry. Their banter loses its playful, teasing quality only when the mother expresses her wish—her unfathomable longing—that Nikolai had stayed. It is the one subject he refuses to discuss.
“I will not be able to do this for James—I cannot conjure him up in any manner,” Li writes in Things in Nature Merely Grow, explaining her decision to eschew the novel form for her younger son. James preferred silence to flourish, fact to fiction. He was the second-grader whose dinner conversation turned on opening gambits like, “Apparently the Higgs boson . . .”; the kindergartner whom she finds in the pickup line after school with a hand-drawn sign around his neck: “IM NOt TaLKING Because I DON’t WaNT TO!” He was the Bartleby to Vincent’s Byron, the boy who could communicate everything with a single “Oh.”
If Li occasionally found her son “mysterious,” it was with the tender understanding that this is how James, in return, viewed most other people. The only book to have ever “captured how he felt about the world” was a memoir by the child prodigy and poet Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. Only with Vincent was James “uncharacteristically talkative.”
Despite Li’s certainty that she cannot “conjure” James, I nevertheless registered his profound absence. This book contains a “black hole” in the “precise shape of [her] two children.”
Grief—and the reader’s inevitable voyeurism into its depths—invites a troubling kind of detective work. Fiercely protective of her sons, and committed to “radical acceptance,” Li largely avoids the kind of “wishful thinking of what-ifs” that would lead us to believe we can change the past, or that the dead can be brought back.
There are patterns, however, of long-term familial struggles with mental health. We learn that Vincent was in counseling years before his death; his therapist once delivered the chilling warning that Li must “be prepared,” because her older son was likely to make an irreversible decision so suddenly “that no one would expect it and no one could stop it.” We learn of Li’s abusive mother, who raised her in Maoist China, and of Li’s own suicide attempt in 2012, for which she was hospitalized.
Li almost resists the temptation to re-legislate whether she could have anticipated James’s decision. She recalls that, a few weeks before he died, he was reading Camus’s deeply pessimistic The Myth of Sisyphus; that he had not cut his hair for six years—since the day he lost his brother. But she ultimately rejects the kind of magical thinking that, by Didion’s own account, drove the latter mad. After all, this is James’s book, for whom such counterfactuals would be “useless; even, a violation of James’s essence.”
Imposing narrative resolution onto a story with none comes, furthermore, at too high a moral cost. “Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice,” Li writes. It is a profound reprimand to readers who seek softer telling—or, worse, blame. The unique value of this memoir is the invitation to reflect on how those of us outside the abyss treat others in the midst of great loss. For this careful, precise, and descriptive book is laced with anger toward the public response. After losing James, Li recalls, tabloids called her the “murderer” of her own children, while Chinese media outlets published the headline “coupled with [her] decision to abandon [her] mother tongue.” A friend—now an “ex-friend”—suggested that Vincent was “taken by God,” and that Li’s “only salvation was the church.” The same woman later made the incredible suggestion losing James was analogous to seeing her own son off to college: “So we are in a similar situation,” she tells Li.
If warping facts in service of emotion is indeed the “beginning of cruelty,” Li’s commitment to cool empiricism dramatizes, by contrast, the devastating loyalty it can take to tell the truth. It is a shocking act of love—a shocking piece of logic—to arrive, contrary to those vicious headlines, at the conclusion to which radical acceptance leads: “A mother can do all things humanly possible for a child” and yet still “not keep that child alive—these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.”
This book is everywhere marked by a mother’s devotion to her children. There are the messages she leaves for her husband to slip into little James’s lunch box whenever she is away; she reads the authors her children read—Camus, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein—in order to be closer to them. Returning to the Tractatus, she notes a line in the preface that reminds her of James: while this difficult book will likely reach only those who have “already thought the thoughts expressed in it,” Wittgenstein warned readers, its “object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding.”
Li, as she confessed to James, did not understand the Tractatus. She was not that “one person” whom it addressed. And yet, however challenging it was to read, it enriched her imagination for life. One feels the same about her steely, heartbreaking, deeply moral tribute to her remarkable son.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors. Her debut story collection, Ghost Pains, was a finalist for the 2025 Story Prize.