In direct and unsparing reflections, Li confronts not only the loss of her children but the limits of language, as she tries to convey anguish that defies description.”
—Alexandra Alter, The New York Times
“[Things in Nature Merely Grow] stuns with its lucidity . . . What is most striking about Li’s book [is] not her grief, but her ability to move beyond guilt to understand ‘that a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still could not keep him alive.’”
—Vikas Turakhia, The Minnesota Star Tribune
“Li’s book doesn’t offer the consolation of wisdom gained, nor a triumphant arc of recovery. Where it finds reassurance is in its rigorous observation of reality. Although Li resists the idea that she might be offering advice or inspiration, her cool-headed clarity does remind readers that it is possible to say the words there is ‘no good way to say.’ In saying them, she finds a means of survival.”
—Helen Brown, Telegraph
“Things in Nature Merely Grow, [Li’s] memoir of losing her sons, is resolutely unsentimental, and yet it might wind you with its emotional force.”
—Sophie McBain, The Guardian
“To state that this courageous book is a testament to love is an understatement. One is left altered by it at the same time as desperately wishing that it had never needed to be written at all.”
—Catherine Taylor, Observer
“Things in Nature Merely Grow is a story of loss that is unlike any other book I’ve read. It’s a work of harsh beauty that exists in a different realm to most grief memoirs. That’s partly because of its startling poise and emotional restraint, and partly because it describes a realm of experience that is exceptionally strange and terrible… It is an unforgettable monument to endurance, one that offers a kind of fierce comfort.”
—Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
“This book is everywhere marked by a mother’s devotion to her children . . . [A] steely, heartbreaking, deeply moral tribute to [Li’s] remarkable son.”
—Jessi Jezewska Stevens, 4Columns
“[Things in Nature Merely Grow] is, among other things, a kind of manual on how to write honestly about the death of loved ones. Throughout, Li refreshingly refuses to indulge in the tired metaphorical thinking that death often invites . . . Li’s style, honed over decades, has never been more distilled.”
—Rhoda Feng, The Boston Globe
“Writers like to acknowledge the poverty of language, usually as we screw up the courage to try something fancy with it. Hordes of us are out there hoping to say the unsayable. Not Li. When she writes that ‘words fall short,’ she means it: the one stock phrase she likes is ‘there is no good way to say this.’ The power of Things in Nature Merely Grow resides in her refusal to pay obeisance to words.”
—Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine
“Li’s astonishing record of how she has chosen acceptance over despair shows why artists among us sometimes offer more wisdom than any other spirituality.”
—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“Li does not shy away from the magnitude of these losses. Instead, she writes of radical acceptance, offering a profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children.”
—Shannon Carlin, TIME
“Things in Nature Merely Grow is an impossible book, yet through Li’s deftness and determination she transforms the book into an intricate and nonlinear portrait of loss and love.”
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books (Must-Read Books of May)
“These pages—refreshingly absent of euphemism, platitudes, false optimism, or an ounce of self-pity—provide something far more useful: a vision of maternal grief that is both brutally honest and, ultimately, survivable.”
— Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily
“Li manages the near impossible in a complex memoir that is as devastating as it is searingly insightful into the contours of grief and acceptance, recommended for anyone who is navigating the nonlinear timeline of loss.”
—Greta Rainbow, Bustle (Best New Books of Spring)
“Li recounts both boys’ lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each . . . Readers who’ve dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here.”
—Publishers Weekly
2025-02-15
A memoir of living with the unbearable grief that followed the suicides of the author’s two teenage sons.
“I am in an abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss.” So writes Li, novelist and memoirist, whose two sons, full of promise, took their own lives—one, she ventures, for reasons of emotion, the other for reasons of thought, both concluding that a “livable life” was not possible. Li recounts her own struggles with depression, struggles not lightened by the delight of a Chinese media that considered her, having left her homeland and taken up writing in English, richly deserving of such punishment. Li lives through words and books, and here, even in the most harrowing moments, she reaches for them to explain herself to herself: here Ludwig Wittgenstein and Euripides, there Shakespeare and Philip Larkin, often Albert Camus. Always her habitat is that abyss, “which is my life,” marked by exhaustion, frustration, endless sorrow, and occasional bemusement, as when she notes that her older son died on the very day she put down a deposit for her new house in Princeton, the kind of coincidence that would seem unbelievable in fiction, on which she concludes, “Life…does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.” Though elegantly written and deeply thought through, Li’s book makes for emotionally difficult reading, offering little comfort for those who may be experiencing similar travails. “Both my children chose a hard thing,” she writes, encapsulating the narrative as a whole. “We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.”
As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.
