REVIEW: How do we reckon? On Yiyun Li's 'Things in Nature Merely Grow'

Losing a child to suicide is unbelievable tragedy, and so, what description would weigh heavy enough to accurately describe losing both of your children this way? It is a rare, profound occurrence when a person is faced with such a life and decides to give us art, like this writing. I can only think of a handful of other titles which reckon with such loss in profundity, such as *Man's Search for Meaning* by Viktor Frankl or *First They Killed My Father* by Loung Un.

Suicide is one of the only things treated as a genuine infohazard in our society. We learn there is reckless danger and risk in discussing the topic, and that it spreads as social contagion. [Research clearly shows this is a myth](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24998511/) and the opposite is true: talking about suicide reduces, rather than increase, suicidal ideation. Talking about things in the open leads to better mental health.

This matter-of-fact memoir is meant for Li's second son, James, who she consistently refers to as her son that thinks. This is in contrast to her first son, Vincent, the son that feels and for whom she wrote *Where Reasons End* for after he ended his own life. Vincent receives a fictional heartfelt novel, and James an autobiography of facts and truths. It is a dichotomy she returns to again and again: how life is comedy for those who think and life is tragedy for those who feel. She notes how James read Camus' *Myth of Sisphyus* shortly before his death. She wonders outloud how he may have thoughtfully, calmly even, decided to act simply after coming to the conclusion life was not livable. And he came to that conclusion on a Friday like any other Friday, after his Japanese undergrad class at university.

In a way, it can be said this book is anti-grief. Li considers grief as having an end-point, as though there could be a finite amount that can be felt when both of your children, all of your children, choose death instead of life. There is no end point—as she quotes Plath, there is only "now and now and now", and Larkin, for "where can we live but days"? We endure the abyss only within the mundane, present moment. Another one of her mantras is that children die while parents simply go on living—in the abyss.

In that anti-grief, there is an emotional compartmentalization and detachment, which I would say is necessary for continuance. Li is stoic, having already found a way to continue after suffering severe abuse in her childhood. Li is a loving mother, and yet she could not save either of her only children. Having such an abusive mother herself, Li believed she was better off dead than to force her own children to suffer and endure a mother so mentally unwell. She writes about her own suicide attempt a few years before Vincent's death, causing her to be inst