THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW

A memoir of living with the unbearable grief that followed the suicides of the author’s two teenage sons.

“I am in an abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss.” So writes Li, novelist and memoirist, whose two sons, full of promise, took their own lives—one, she ventures, for reasons of emotion, the other for reasons of thought, both concluding that a “livable life” was not possible. Li recounts her own struggles with depression, struggles not lightened by the delight of a Chinese media that considered her, having left her homeland and taken up writing in English, richly deserving of such punishment. Li lives through words and books, and here, even in the most harrowing moments, she reaches for them to explain herself to herself: here Ludwig Wittgenstein and Euripides, there Shakespeare and Philip Larkin, often Albert Camus. Always her habitat is that abyss, “which is my life,” marked by exhaustion, frustration, endless sorrow, and occasional bemusement, as when she notes that her older son died on the very day she put down a deposit for her new house in Princeton, the kind of coincidence that would seem unbelievable in fiction, on which she concludes, “Life…does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.” Though elegantly written and deeply thought through, Li’s book makes for emotionally difficult reading, offering little comfort for those who may be experiencing similar travails. “Both my children chose a hard thing,” she writes, encapsulating the narrative as a whole. “We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.”

As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there’s nothing else one can do.