Things in Nature Merely Grow

De: Yiyun Li

Narrado por: Suzanne Toren

Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this audiobook.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. 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.”

There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.

This is a book for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2025 Yiyun Li (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“In this intimate memoir, novelist Li remembers her teenage sons, James and Vincent, after their deaths by suicide . . . 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

“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)