Yiyun Li for Things in Nature Merely Grow

Yiyun Li is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including Where Reasons End, and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other places. Her accolades include the Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a Windham-Campbell prize, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Yiyun joins us in Bath this May to discuss her latest work, Things in Nature Merely Grow: a 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 book.

'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: 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 a book 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.