Things in Nature Merely Grow: How a Mother Keeps Living in the Abyss

On May 4, 2026, the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography went to a book that resists classification: Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow. With it she became the first writer of Chinese descent to win the award.

Li was born in Beijing and went to the United States as a young woman to study for a doctorate in immunology. Halfway through, she realised that what she actually wanted to do was write. She gave up the degree and began making fiction in English. She now teaches creative writing at Princeton. In 2010 she received a MacArthur Fellowship and was named by The New Yorker one of the twenty best writers under forty; her novel The Book of Goose won the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Wednesday’s Child was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Before Things in Nature Merely Grow, her subject had always been silence and solitude, and the pain of people who cannot truly reach one another. This time the subject is herself.

In 2017 her elder son, Vincent, killed himself by stepping in front of a train. He was sixteen. In 2024 her younger son, James, ended his life in the same way. He was nineteen. Both boys died in Princeton, not far from home.

A Book That Refuses Healing

Let us be clear about what this book is not.

It is not a book about grief and recovery. Li does not believe that wounds necessarily close, or that mourning can be cured. Life does go on, but the sentence “it will pass with time” is, to her mind, false.

Nor will she accept “mourning” as a description of what she has done. Mourning means returning the dead to the past and asking memory to keep vigil over them. What she wants is to keep her sons in the present — a present that continues, that stays, that does not end.

One passage in the book is quoted again and again: the one verb that never dies is the verb to be. Vincent was, is, and always will be Vincent; James was, is, and always will be James; she and her husband were, are, and always will be their parents.

What makes the sentence so arresting is that it refuses the usual arrangement of tenses. When someone dies, we hand them over to “used to be.” Li will not. She insists on the present tense for her children, even when that present no longer contains their bodies.

The Failure of Language, and the Necessity of Writing

When the news came, the police officer said: “There is no right way to say this.”

There is no right way. However carefully the words are chosen, death does not become bearable. No fine sentence, no graceful figure of speech can take any weight off the fact itself.

Later a detective came to the house a second time and returned James’s backpack — as, years before, someone had returned Vincent’s phone. People die; objects do not. The table is still there, the shoes are still there, the notebooks are still there. Only the person is not coming back.

Years earlier, after Vincent died, she wrote Where Reasons End. That book almost ran to her pen by itself: while Vincent was alive the two of them were always talking and arguing, sometimes close, sometimes fierce; after his death the conversation did not stop but crossed the border between the living and the dead and kept going. She called it a novel because no dead child really comes back to argue with his mother. “Where reasons end” is the place where reason can go no further and literature has to take over.

But when it came to James, she could not begin.

She knew the book was there. She knew she would have to write it. She could not find a way in. James was quieter than his brother, more inward. He loved language but was not a talkative child. How do you use language to approach a child who was already silent?

And when, exactly, had Vincent’s death spread into James? How had James reckoned with his own dying? Why the same method as his brother? There are no answers. Language is not omnipotent; it cannot help her understand.

Still, she had to write. Language is the only tool she has. She knew it would fail, knew she might fail James, knew the book was doomed to be imperfect from the first page — but if she did not write it, then there would not even be a failure.

Even if language cannot redeem anyone, a person still needs it: to keep a place for the dead, and to win for herself the possibility of continuing to exist.

Saying “Death” Outright

After Vincent died, the parent of a classmate asked her whether she could tell her own child that Vincent had died in an accident.

The parents wanted to protect their children from something brutal. Li thought this was precisely a way of belittling children, and of doing damage to Vincent’s existence and his memory. What has happened should be called by its own name. The weakness that refuses to face the truth very easily turns into a worse kind of cruelty.

She insists on the word “death,” and refuses the softer, euphemistic, prettified substitutes. She even sets a threshold at the door of the book: if you cannot accept a mother saying outright that her child died; if you believe love is all-powerful and that where there is love everything will be well; if you think it is bad luck to talk about suicide and death; if you believe that all suffering eventually leads to reconciliation and transcendence — then perhaps you should stop reading.

Because what this book describes is how to live alongside the dead until you die yourself.

Free Will, and a Failing Intuition

After James died, she and her husband remembered a photograph from his kindergarten years: the little boy wearing a sign on his chest that said, “I don’t talk because I don’t want to!”

Her husband said that what the whole family believed in, really, was the same thing: free will.

Vincent was like that too. When he was small she wanted to sign him up for a football club, and he told her, with perfect seriousness, that she was not doing it to make him happy but because she wanted him to be like the other children. She gave up the idea. Later he wanted to wear a dress to school. She handed him a dark one to reduce the risk of bullying; Vincent insisted on pink. “If I’m going to wear a dress and it isn’t pink, what’s the point? If anyone dares laugh at me, I’ll wear pink so they can see.”

She admired him and was uneasy at the same time. Of course she was proud of his courage. But she also knew that the world outside the front door might not be kind to a child so free and so brave.

For the six years before Vincent died, she had a quiet fear that one day he would leave. She kept the fear beneath a calm surface: “You can’t carry a fire extinguisher on your back for the rest of your life just because you’re afraid of fire.”

You cannot watch a child twenty-four hours a day and guarantee that he stays alive. You can have intuition; you can walk into his room at midnight to check that he is still there; but you can never know when to trust the intuition and when you have to let go.

She is wary of intuition itself. Intuition, too, is a narrative, and narratives are far too good at deceiving us into thinking we hold the meaning and the explanation. Years before, weeping, she had said that to see Vincent graduate from high school would be a victory. Vincent did not live to graduate.

A few weeks before James died, his therapist asked whether she was worried that her younger son might also be suicidal. She answered that she could not be a hundred per cent sure, but that she did not think he was in that state.

The mother’s intuition failed again. She writes about the bewilderment with great honesty: she really had not seen it. Sometimes admitting the failure is crueller than the failure itself.

Radical Acceptance: The Abyss Is Where You Live

She writes: if I am to spend the rest of my life in the abyss, then the abyss is where I live. A person should not waste strength fighting the place where she lives.

This is nothing like the story we are used to. We say that wounds heal, that sooner or later you will come out of the dark and back into the sun. Li will not accept the consolation. The abyss is part of her life now, and what she has to learn is how to keep living inside it.

After losing a second child, she knew which things mattered: sleep, water, small meals, exercise every day; getting up at a fixed hour and not lying in bed chewing over the pain; making a good cup of coffee, carefully, in the morning; reading a little — a scene of Shakespeare, a passage of Euclid, a poem by Wallace Stevens, any of it would do; and going on writing, neither stopping in order to heal nor burying herself in work in order to escape.

These are survival techniques she worked out inside the disaster. A person does not have to force herself to become stronger; she only has to keep from truly falling apart while her life is close to ruin.

The psychological term she borrows is radical acceptance. No pretence of being at peace, no gritting of teeth — only the admission that what happened has happened, will not change, will not be called off, and will not one day turn into a story that time has blown away. Her child’s death has already rewritten her life. Given that, there is no point fighting a reality that cannot be changed.

And after acceptance? Meaning is still not to be found. The abyss still has no way out. But a life can be built again.

Twenty-Four Hundred Bulbs

In the autumn before James died, she planted twelve hundred bulbs, on top of seven hundred and five hundred planted in the two years before. Winter passed; the snow began to melt and green shoots pushed up through the frozen ground; by the end of March the flowers were everywhere.

A sentence kept coming back to her: things in nature merely grow.

That is where the title comes from. Plants and trees do not ask why, do not ask what it means; they only grow, and when it is time to wither they wither. They exist in their own way.

Her garden, she says, is not a metaphor for hope, not a symbol of renewal, and the flowers are not messengers of light and optimism. A plant has one aim: to live. Grow when it can, lie dormant when it must, live until it dies.

For her the garden is something that holds a place in a life. Death knocks so many holes in a life that a person needs concrete things to fill the places. A garden cannot solve grief, but tending it gives her something to do every day; and as long as there is something to do, a life will not collapse entirely.

Cooking Is Making a Place for Someone

The book says that many of the things we do in life are, at bottom, ways of making a place for something, of holding open a space for someone. Writing is like that. Cooking is like that. Raising children is like that.

Once she cooked for a family of four, then for three, and now for herself and her husband. Cooking is a measure that makes time concrete, that gives each day of the week a place to land.

She will not say the meals are made out of “love.” The word is used too often in ordinary life and grows hollow too easily. She would rather say that they are made out of care, and attention.

She trusts concrete actions more than abstract words: the colour, the texture, the taste of food, every detail on a plate taken seriously. Just as when writing she asks each word to be as exact as possible, so when cooking she asks that everything on the plate be real.

That habit of care changes how she understands parenting too. Parents keep making room for a child to grow into what he is. And the work is doomed: sooner or later the child walks outside the space his parents held open, and the world is waiting at the door.

Where a Mother Comes From

By the end of the book, Li has come back to herself.

She writes about her mother. As a child she and her sister were almost the targets of her mother’s anger. There was an unpredictable rage in her mother that any small thing could set off. She was beaten even when she came home with high marks, because her mother thought she had been smug in reporting them. At eight she left a scarf at school, was frightened out of her wits, and the next second was kicked into a large metal basin full of water, where she could not get up, like a turtle turned on its back.

Worse were the words that cut like knives. She protested, asking her mother why she treated her this way; her mother would enter another, more terrible rage, call her a murderer, say she had deliberately provoked her, wanted to drive her mad and to her death, and finally throw down the line: you will die badly.

So she is not the figure her prose suggests — always calm, always restrained, always at a distance from her pain. She grew up in a house full of humiliation, violence and emotional extortion.

When she later tried to kill herself, at the worst point of a mental crisis, it was not because she did not love her children. It was precisely because she knew what a mother who has lost her mind can do to a child. If I am losing my grip on reality, she thought, if I am sliding towards some kind of madness, then I would rather my children did not have to face a mad mother. She knew the damage too well, and so she preferred to erase herself from her children’s lives.

Some abused children grow up to be rebels; some grow up to be runaways. She is one of the latter, and has spent a lifetime honing the art of escape. She did everything in her power to keep her children from suffering what she had suffered. And in the end they died anyway.

She cannot even be certain: whether her own suicide attempt all those years ago taught the young Vincent that death solves everything, and whether Vincent’s death then infected James. You try with all your might not to pass the wound on, and in the end the wound changes shape and lands on them anyway.

Swimming: Keeping Yourself in the World

In the summer after James died she went back to the university pool. The term was over; the students had gone. James should have just finished his first year; Vincent should have graduated that year.

She lowered herself in slowly and became the slowest swimmer in the pool. The second slowest was a man who looked at least ninety.

She had been afraid of water as a child, and later learned, on and off over more than a year, so that she could go in with her two sons, just enough to stay in the shallow end. When the boys grew old enough not to need her, she stopped. It was after Vincent died that she began again — not for the children this time, but for herself.

She goes at six thirty every morning. Counting breaths, kicking, reaching, calculating the angle of entry, turning her head to breathe. Every movement has to pass through consciousness; every movement has to be attended to.

To other people her life already looks strange enough; to her it looks strange too. It does not matter. She is not looking for release in the water, and she is not swimming to cure herself. She is using the movements to keep herself in the world.

In such a life she can still think, and slowly accept a fact: as long as a person is not dead, nothing in her life is truly final. All the conclusions that seem final are only temporary.

At the End, Only One Hand

The children are dead and the parents go on living. This is a fact.

A mother did everything she could and still could not keep her children alive. This is also a fact.

These facts do not need adjectives. There is no need to add “tragic,” “astonishing,” “unimaginable” to make them heavier; they are already as heavy as anything can be.

The book ends with an image. Sometimes, she says, a mother and a child are like two hands lying side by side, lightly touching, or with fingers laced. Then the world turns, and only one hand is left where it was, holding everything, and holding the emptiness that holds nothing, holding the thing called now, now, now, now.

She does not say that she has found an answer, or learned to let go, or finally come to be at peace with everything. She only lets us see: the world is still turning, one hand is gone, and this hand that remains is still here. It holds memory, and facts, and emptiness, and language, and life itself.

Perhaps this is what she wants to say to the world: I am still here. I will go on thinking, go on writing, go on living.