SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Yiyun Li's new book is about thinking through the unimaginable. It's a departure from her many short stories and novels, and it's a sequel of sorts to her book about the death of her eldest son, Vincent, who died by suicide at 16 years of age. This new book is about her second son, James.
YIYUN LI: James always liked to elude attention. He didn't want to be seen. He didn't want to be heard. He would never share his thoughts, or he rarely shared his thoughts with people.
SIMON: The book for James is called "Things In Nature Merely Grow," and NPR's Barrie Hardymon has more.
BARRIE HARDYMON, BYLINE: There's no easy way to say this - only seven years after the death of her first son, Yiyun Li's son James died at 19. As she puts it, both chose suicide.
LI: The book started when the police came. It was in that moment I realized to be able to live through this difficulty would require me to think, rather than to feel.
HARDYMON: Li emigrated from communist China to the U.S. for college. She is now a professor of writing at Princeton. She wrote a novel about her first son. This book required a different approach.
LI: I decided to write in nonfiction in the most, suppose, unadorned way because that was how James was. His thinking was clear and precise and unemotional.
HARDYMON: It may not sound possible, but this is not actually a sad book. It reads like a diary. You're following her thoughts in the aftermath of what some might call unthinkable, but this is a book about thinking.
LI: Life is quite strange and difficult, and we all have that experience. And I think I look at this book as something that is about thinking through things or thinking through a difficult time. I'm not teaching people how to do that, but this - I'm writing about how I did it, hoping that people would say, yes, there is a way you live. You start with facts.
HARDYMON: She came to this realization, to just start with the facts, while having lunch with her friend, talking about a future without her two sons.
LI: We're close. So I said, oh, Bonnie (ph), this will be my life. I said, this will have to be my life. And she was quite shocked. She said, what do you mean this will be your life? This is.
HARDYMON: That clear-eyed focus on what is became her philosophy - radical acceptance.
LI: Radical acceptance to me means this is. This is it. I accept I lost my children in this manner, and nothing I say or do or don't say or don't do will change that fact.
HARDYMON: Li is very attentive to how people talk about these facts. In the book, when a parent from her son's school asks if she can use the word accident in place of suicide with her own children, Li calls it a betrayal and a violation. But she understands the impulse.
LI: It's human nature. If something is too hard, you find a euphemism. As though, when you replace with something easier, it's easier for people to live with.
HARDYMON: Li thinks euphemisms are a way for people to protect themselves at the expense of the person grieving. The book has a wryly funny passage listing the range of reactions people have to the death of her sons. People use words like silver lining, better place, end of the tunnel. They are, Li notes, terrified of the magnitude of her tragedy.
LI: Sadness and tragedies, they're not infectious. But people would treat those conditions as infectious, which is disappointing but inevitable. I keep saying it's inevitable because every behavior is human behavior.
HARDYMON: The book is also full of examples of how to show up for people in ways that actually help.
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN: It certainly taught me how to help somebody going through terrible things.
HARDYMON: The author Elizabeth McCracken has been friends with Li for years. She taught her at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She's one of the many friends who appear throughout the book as a source of support and normalcy and the occasional well-timed joke. McCracken was one of the first readers of "Things In Nature Merely Grow."
MCCRACKEN: She sent it to me, and I sat down and happened to look at the first page and didn't mean to read it all - and read it all. It's a page-turner.
HARDYMON: McCracken has written about the loss of her mother and a child in her own work.
MCCRACKEN: I mean, I think part of the compulsion to write about somebody that you've lost is to keep them close to you. And I really do think that writing is an action. It's something that you do, and it changes the way you think about the past and your own emotions.
HARDYMON: The death of her sons certainly changed the way Li thought, McCracken says, but she's still very much herself.
MCCRACKEN: She is kind and steadfast and then, also, you know, just one of the most interesting people on the face of the earth and a world-class gossip.
(LAUGHTER)
MCCRACKEN: Even on the saddest days, we would gossip.
HARDYMON: It's one of the most surprising things about Li's book - about life, really - the way she still does the things she loves - gossips with friends, tends the garden - without letting go of the sons she lost.
LI: I think about them all the time, right? I think about them every day. I think about little things, big things. So they are quite present in my thoughts, and they're present in my life in the way that it doesn't take a lot to bring them alive.
HARDYMON: Yiyun Li's memoir is called "Things In Nature Merely Grow."
Barrie Hardymon, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUSTY DECKS' "GHOST BAND RUN")
SIMON: And if you or someone you know may be in danger of harming themselves, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUSTY DECKS' "GHOST BAND RUN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
