by Shay Zutshi
“If one is to send flowers as a gesture of condolence, better to ensure the flowers arrive already arranged in a vase.”
This direct, unapologetic language defines acclaimed fiction author-turned-memoirist Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow. The 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography chronicles Li’s reckoning with the suicide of her younger son, James, after having previously lost another son, Vincent, the same way. Told without a traditional narrative structure, the 192-page memoir explores how she continues living after her children have not. It includes chapters on her own childhood and suicide attempt, her existence in an abyss, and her experience as a childless parent. She embraces radical acceptance of her son’s death – fully inhabiting her new reality to reduce emotional suffering. Through her untraditional navigation of grief and matter-of-fact expressiveness, Li crafts a memoir that is sad and hard-hitting, but not in the way you might expect.
Speaking of both sons in the book, she writes: “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.”
The book reframed how I think about death, grief, and consoling those who have lost a loved one. When someone close to me is mourning, I typically call to offer my condolences and ask about their favorite memories of the deceased. And while I’m smart enough not to say, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” I never quite know what to say to someone whose loved one has died.
Yiyun Li answers this: it’s okay to admit that you don’t know what to say. She writes that in the aftermath of her children’s deaths, “the most comforting [letters] were those that expressed shock, confusion, helplessness, and the pain of not having the right words.” Her candid account of how she wishes people would act around grieving parents surfaces throughout the book. Many of its shining moments involve brutal honesty by members of her social circle: an acquaintance questioning if James would consider suicide after his brother did it, a friend telling her she did all she could for James and had to let him go because he chose to. Another explains Li’s loneliness as people staying away because they can’t offer the conventional shoulder to cry on due to her unconventional mourning style – her radical acceptance. These acute articulations reframe James’s death as a natural ending rather than a horrible tragedy – like how “things in nature merely grow until it’s time for them to die.”
Grief takes different forms for different people, but Li takes this concept to a whole new level. She does not take breaks from writing, piano lessons, or gardening. She keeps going. This isn’t to say that she’s over James’s death. She states that grief is not a straight line, that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, no fixed point at which grief ends and she can live like “one of [us] normal people.” Her portrayal of grief as a continuous, unending process underscores a central tenet of radical acceptance: those who lose a child continue living with that pain. Li depicts this reality bluntly without forcing her views on the reader. Even if readers don’t agree with how she handles James’s death, her statements are grounded in facts and logic – exactly what James would have wanted, she writes.
Speaking of James, Li paints vivid pictures of her son without directly telling us much about him. I feel like I know him well, though I never met him. Through a combination of anecdotes and simple descriptions, Li brings her son to life – a poor choice of words, perhaps, but an accurate one. She beautifully describes small details that made him who he was: his proclivity for learning languages, his advanced vocabulary from a young age, and his taciturn, contemplative nature, rendered perfectly in a single sentence:
“He [would] reply with that single word, ‘oh,’ meaning, you’re overthinking, or, you’re going down the wrong path, or, let us each read and philosophize on our own, or, simply, please leave me alone.”
Li frames her writing as James might have spoken: logical and straightforward. She presents him as a person at peace with his decision instead of as another front page news story of a young man taking his own life. This deepens her radical acceptance of his death, which breaks my heart since her portrait of James makes him more than simply a character on a page. Her portrayal makes him feel painfully, beautifully real.
I seldom read memoirs, much less recommend them. But Things In Nature Merely Grow changed how I think about the parents of a deceased child, especially of one who has died by suicide. Li’s bluntness is striking; her insistence that condolence flowers arrive pre-arranged magnifies her conscious efforts to live in the present rather than dwell on the past. If you want to inhabit the world of a mother who simultaneously acknowledges the loss of her sons and savors their presence, pick up Yiyun Li’s book.
Editors’ Note: In addition to winning the Pulitzer, Things in Nature Merely Grow was a 2025 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction. Yiyun Li’s previous book written for her son Vincent is titled Where Reasons End: A Novel, published in 2021. Li teaches at Princeton University.
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