Reviews - Things in Nature Merely Grow

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360 reviews for:

Things in Nature Merely Grow

Yiyun Li

4.52 AVERAGE

dustlesswalnut's review against another edition

5.0

emotional reflective sad fast-paced

pariahassouri's review

4.0

A memoir from a writing professor at Princeton whose sons both commit suicide about six years apart. A short read, but intense and sad and thought provoking.

emreadsbooksagain's review against another edition

5.0

emotional reflective sad fast-paced

This book is courageous and open, authentic and vulnerable, raw and gentle. The author speaks of her immeasurable and unquantifiable loss and reflects on this in her own context, with words that do somehow manage to carve out a shape of the depth and intensity of her emotions, yet also philosophies on what it means to encounter and live on. It is profound and heartbreaking. I have no idea how she wrote this book, but I think anyone who reads this will treasure it. It rips you open, so it's best to go in prepared. But it is a depiction of the abyss she is facing as a parent who has lost children and it is a true gift that she has shared it with us. The author reflects on parenting, mental health, trauma, choices and much more. The writing is real and deep. I think it will bring solace to anyone navigating the day to day of dealing with loss and acquainting themselves with living in the now and now and now.

If you have read this and need other books that speak to similar themes, gentle and tender representations of death and loss are:

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

thesighinggardens's review against another edition

I read an excerpt of this book in the New Yorker a couple months ago and cried almost instantaneously (a word Li would dislike). Maybe it’s that Li was intentionally using her ‘thinking’ brain when writing (opposed to feeling) but I felt that his book encapsulated the Wallace Stevens quote at the beginning. I assumed the title would denote some of the sentimental thinking/meaning that Li would later disparage, but I was (gladly) wrong.