Novelist Yiyun Li has spoken about the deaths of both her sons by suicide, as her memoir of loss is published. Her elder son Vincent died in 2017 at age 16, and her younger son James died in 2024 at age 19. Li, a professor at Princeton University, wrote a novel for Vincent titled Where Reasons End, which she described as a conversation between a mother and her dead son. She said writing it brought 'the joy of meeting him again in the book'.
For James, Li wrote the memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, completed in less than two months. She described James as a brilliant but private boy who could converse in eight languages and whose phone was set to Lithuanian. Li said she wanted the book to be 'as clear as James, as logical and rational'. She rejects the idea that writing was cathartic, instead calling it 'the solace of thinking'.
Li, a MacArthur genius grant winner, said she feels like 'a very strange woman' because her losses are so extreme. She rejects the notion that grief is a process with a light at the end, noting that the word 'grief' derives from 'burden'. 'My children were not my burden. My sadness is not my burden,' she said. She continues to teach and garden, planting 1,600 bulbs this year, but insists the flowers are not a metaphor.
