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Book review: Yiyun Li’s Things In Nature Merely Grow remakes the grief memoir
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Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li's memoir, Things In Nature Merely Grow (2025), reckons logically with losing both her teenage sons, Vincent and James, to suicide less than seven years apart.
PHOTOS: BASSO CANNARSA, 4TH ESTATE
By Yiyun Li
Memoir/4th Estate/Paperback/192 pages/$34.34
With Cordelia dead in his arms, King Lear lets out four howls for his daughter. In King John, Constance tears her hair in grief after losing her son Arthur. In 1596, Shakespeare lost his 11-year-old son Hamnet, an event which may have sharpened the anguish in his later tragedies.
