About the Book: In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li delivers a searingly honest memoir that confronts the unspeakable: the deaths by suicide of both her sons—Vincent, at 16 in 2017, and James, 19 in 2024. Instead of traditional mourning, Li embraces radical acceptance and a relentless search for words to hold space for her children, writing not of grief but of being. She gardens, studies Camus and Wittgenstein, learns piano, and lives thinkingly alongside death, insisting that “being” does not end. With intellectual rigor and emotional clarity, Li explores what it means to love, to lose, and to carry the presence of those gone, writing a book that is at once a tribute, a philosophical inquiry, and a testament to a mother’s indomitable spirit