This is an extraordinary and extraordinarily difficult book. Yiyun Li writes after losing both of her sons to suicide, and Things in Nature Merely Grow is not an attempt to resolve grief or turn it into something reassuring. She writes about continuing to live alongside what cannot be changed.
Li writes about the things that work: writing, reading, gardening, learning the piano, thinking. I am interested in that insistence on continuing to engage with life, not because loss becomes less consequential, and because life remains consequential too. I know art works too.
