Things in Nature Merely Grow

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR/AUTOBIOGRAPHY
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography

One of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.

"The voice actor Suzanne Toren delivers a careful and sensitive reading, embodying the author’s calmly analytical mind, which is testament to the human ability to endure." — The Guardian

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this audiobook.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.

This is an audiobook for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.