Dear readers, The writer Yiyun Li has an astonishing ability to translate her experiences of profound heartbreak and distress into literature. That ability was tested again after her son James took his life in 2024, a little more than six years after his older brother, Vincent, did the same. Only through writing could she grapple with the deaths of her two sons. But the result of that writing, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” is no ordinary grief memoir. The book “is a radical rebuke of the conventions surrounding grieving,” writes my colleague Alexandra Alter, who interviewed Li. Hers is not a story of moving on from loss. Rather, “I don’t ever want to be free from the pain of missing my children,” Li said. In 2019, after Vincent’s death, Li published the novel “Where Reasons End,” an intimate imagined conversation between a mother and her dead son. Vincent’s voice came readily to her, and the book was a way to keep “him around for a little bit,” Li said. With James, it was harder, and Li worried that any attempt to capture him through writing could only end in “a partial failure.” Yet the resulting work is a frank repudiation of common maxims about how to make sense of loss. “Sometimes there is no silver lining in life,” Li writes in her new book. “Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.” Like this email? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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