About the author
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and professor who writes in English. Her fiction and nonfiction are marked by exact sentences, difficult intimacy, and an unwillingness to make suffering serve a convenient lesson.
Things in Nature Merely Grow considers the death of her son James after the earlier loss of her son Vincent. It is a book of continued attention rather than a conventional recovery narrative.
Where to start
Start with Things in Nature Merely Grow if you are prepared for a direct meditation on suicide, the death of children, and the forms of daily life that continue beside loss.
