Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li audiobook review – a deconstruction of grief

The author’s prize-winning memoir about losing both her sons to suicide is a calm, sensitive account of ‘radical acceptance’ ‘There is no good way to say this.” This is the phrase used by police when visiting the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li – twice. On the first occasion, officers advise her and her husband to sit down before telling them their son, Vincent, has died by suicide. The couple hear the same line several years later when James, their other son, dies – also by suicide. “My hus...

By Fiona Sturges