As more and more people are discussing their mental health openly, it is hard to have one memoir top another. Everyone’s issues are singular, personal to the point where readers sometimes can feel shy or uncomfortable knowing these things. Every once in a while, though, a Mary Karr, a Maggie Nelson or even a Tatum O’Neal presents a visceral and stinging account of a difficult life.

However, Yiyun Li’s experience is so particularly moving and painful that I would say she really opens her broken heart very wide. In THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW, she writes about the suicide of her 19-year-old son, James, in 2024 after having healed --- to an extent --- from the death of her 16-year-old son, Vincent, who did the same in 2017 (MUST I GO was written as fiction but with direct experiences from her own life). It’s devastating yet so practical, humbling and numbing that it will take readers down many paths of their own and keep this book on their shelves as a message for grief in all shapes and sizes.

"Yiyun Li’s experience is so particularly moving and painful that I would say she really opens her broken heart very wide.... Being caught off-guard as Li was, the story is levitating on waves of shock and rationality in equal measure."

The back of the somber green hardcover reads: “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 doesn’t try to skim over any of Li’s pain with an extramarital affair, a sudden onset of alcohol dependency, or other reckless behavior so popular in our “adulting is hard” landscape. This is not a book for people who know who they are, what’s important to them, or that there’s an end to everything. Being caught off-guard as Li was, the story is levitating on waves of shock and rationality in equal measure.

“After Vincent died, I asked a child psychologist, who was seeing James at the time, how we were to answer strangers’ questions about our family makeup. ‘How many children do you have?’ someone asked me…while I was waiting for James at the fencing studio. When his two fencing friends…came over and saw Vincent’s paintings around the house, the little girl…blurted out in astonishment, ‘James has a brother?’ One does not want to lie about the most important things. Deaths do not change how we see ourselves. But one has to be realistic about the world, too.”

Reading through Li’s understated and non-hysterical way of living with her pain will make you stop in your tracks with gratitude the next time anyone you love upsets you. To see them is to have another chance to appreciate them, which she makes clear in her work. Li is a writer through and through. She continues to write and garden, takes up reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learns the piano, and lives her life as she comes to grips with the loss of her sons.

The most emotional response to Li’s own pain is in the chapter where she considers the good and kind folks who say they understand what she's going through because they have lost pets or parents. Li reminds us that she is grateful when people reach out to her but says “there is no comparison” when they try to make these assessments of her mindset. Like nature, Li continues to live with her grief alongside the life she has been given and doesn’t try to teach the reader why this happened or how it happened. Her advice is inherent in “now and now and now and now.” In matters of life and death, that is all there is.