Novelist Yiyun Li read from her new memoir at a packed Cambridge Public Library last week, speaking about the suicides of her two sons and how she turned to art and writing in her grief.
In “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir earlier this month, Li writes about her son James, who died in 2024. This was six years after his brother, Vincent, died of suicide, which became the subject of Li’s book “Where Reasons End.”
Li finished her reading with the final words of “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” describing the idea that has carried her through grief:
“Sometimes a mother and a child are like two hands placed next to each other: only just touching, or else with fingers intertwined. Then the world turns, and one hand is left, holding on to everything and nothing that is called now and now and now and now.”
Grace Talusan, author of the 2019 memoir “The Body Papers,” led a conversation with Li, who sported black horn-rimmed glasses and striped pants with shiny red Adidas shoes. Li said she experienced a taboo surrounding mourning after each of her sons’ deaths. Would-be sympathizers often asked her what stage of grief she was in. “People hope you’ll get over it as soon as possible,” she said.
To understand her grief, she turned to King Lear, Camus, and Anna Karenina. “Art allows us to feel extreme emotion,” said Li.
She also shared her back story, immigrating from Beijing to pursue doctoral studies in immunology at the University of Iowa. After she took a course in creative writing, she dropped her Ph.D. program and studied for a master’s degree in fine arts, which she finished in 2005.
“What could be more different than writing, writing in English?” she asked. “Which was not a rational decision. It may be the only inexplicable decision I’ve made in my life,” she said with a light chuckle, her hair’s soft silver swoop glinting under the library lights.
Li said that she doesn’t write from a cultural identity of being Chinese and an immigrant. “That is who I am,” she said. “When I write, I don’t necessarily think of myself. I mostly pay attention to the characters.”
One story she shared drew laughs from across the room. Her novel “The Book of Goose” follows two teenagers in post-WWII France. While she was writing it, she asked her agent
“Do you think I am participating in something called … cultural appropriation?”
Her agent replied, “I think we’ll be okay.”
Li’s memoir is emblematic in its clarity and precision of language, despite the wrenching nature of its subjects, including maternal grief. “That a mother can do all things humanly possible for her children and yet cannot keep them alive — this is a fact that eschews any adjective,” Li read. “In this abyss that I call my life, facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to.”
When asked about this precision by Talusan, Li described the “pressure” she places on words to accurately and precisely describe living as intentional. Through her grief, she adhered to her daily writing and reading routine as a form of “marking time,” quoting Elizabeth Jane Howard’s historical novels, as well as gardening and playing piano.
“I can live in the abyss while still living,” she said.
Li described a practice that helped her write, even when her own work was too heavy.
“If I can’t read my work, I copy ‘Moby Dick’ … If I can hand copy a paragraph, that’s better than not writing a paragraph,” Li added. She has copied her way through to Chapter 57 of “Moby Dick.”
Library staff organized Li’s event in honor of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
Members of the audience, who later lined up out the door of the library’s lecture hall to get Li to sign their books, shared their own stories during the talk: losing a child, struggling with suicidal thoughts, and grieving suicide within their families. Some, like Li, had translated their experiences onto the page.
Li teaches undergraduate writing at Princeton University, and she advises her students on “how to pay attention and what to pay attention to” amidst failing attention spans. “We write with the texture of life,” Li said.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or know someone who is, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
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