An elegant, somewhat aloof rumination ... Written in unembellished, detached prose that is as involved with itself and its imprecision ... Li writes about her preternaturally gifted sons as though they were no different from other children; they clearly were, given to witty ripostes and metaphysical asides ... Inculcated by her in a certain attitude of ambivalence—or, to put it another way, in a tenuousness about entering the fray—they were acutely aware of the likely failure of life to live up to its billing as an inherently meaningful affair and of the fragile nature of the whole earthbound enterprise ... Still, none of these speculations about their respective temperaments explains why the boys, seemingly deeply loved and flourishing, decided to opt out so early on ... There is no simple toting up of all the factors and arriving at a satisfactory explanation ... A commemoration of her sons’ brief lives, an elliptical documentation of their vivid, singular presences before they disappeared ... Disturbing, inconsolable tribute, a memoir unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away.

The volume is full of the boys’ presence as Li crafts an ethereal memorial ... Lack of a precise descriptor does not prevent Li from beautifully narrating her nonlinear, never-ending odyssey of pain ... A mother, she writes, cannot keep a child alive. In writing like Li’s, however, even absent children can live on.

A principled and forbidding project, an edifice to reason built on a foundation of sorrow ... Poignant ... Halting, haunted.

Writing from the abyss, she clings resolutely to facts ... A kind of manual on how to write honestly about the death of loved ones. Throughout, Li refreshingly refuses to indulge in the tired metaphorical thinking that death often invites ... Li’s style, honed over decades, has never been more distilled. Appropriately for a book that purports to stenograph only her thoughts, she writes in a simple, pared-back language ... Elicits many difficult feelings. I had to put it down at several places before I found myself able to return to it. Yet Li’s brutal lucidity — her refusal to burnish her thoughts and sentiments to a high sheen — is its own form of ethical commitment.

Despite Li’s certainty that she cannot 'conjure' James, I nevertheless registered his profound absence ... It is a profound reprimand to readers who seek softer telling—or, worse, blame. The unique value of this memoir is the invitation to reflect on how those of us outside the abyss treat others in the midst of great loss. For this careful, precise, and descriptive book is laced with anger toward the public response ... Li’s commitment to cool empiricism dramatizes, by contrast, the devastating loyalty it can take to tell the truth ... [A] steely, heartbreaking, deeply moral tribute to her remarkable son.

At once blunt and cutting—sparing no one, and least of all Li herself ... While Li’s writing eschews the banalities of pop psychology, there’s something acutely therapeutic about her memoir ... Her memoir offers a startlingly practical approach to grieving even as it deconstructs grief’s clichés ... In Li’s marked shuttling between fact and speculation, her memoir performs a kind of magic trick that only brutally honest writing can: It provides a sense of James from a distance, mediated through imperfect language, an approximation of intimacy without invasiveness ... By the end, one grasps the mother’s radical acceptance of the fact that she will never attain a complete understanding of her son, and grasps it through her luminous—but limited—language.

What I found to be so profound about this book is its unique approach to loss. I’ve read Yiyun Li’s fiction before—she is a master of words, a master of making ideas flow flawlessly from thought to paper. I knew that the prose of this book would be just as strong as her fiction writing, but what I perhaps hadn’t put enough thought to was how starkly different the ideas within this book would be than what I expected ... This is a hard book. Losing two children is an incredibly hard thing. No matter where you stand on grief—whether you’re entirely free of it, drowning in it, or somewhere in between—I suggest letting Yiyun Li’s words wash over you, for in this tribute you may just find something in which to feel solace.

Stuns with its lucidity and with the nightmarish facts that prompted its writing ... What is most striking about Li’s book — not her grief, but her ability to move beyond guilt ... Her clarity, which can feel steely and cold, isn’t cruelty or self-deception.

A story of loss that is unlike any other book I’ve read. It’s a work of harsh beauty that exists in a different realm to most grief memoirs. That’s partly because of its startling poise and emotional restraint, and partly because it describes a realm of experience that is exceptionally strange and terrible ... Things in Nature is likely to divide readers over the question of whether it’s a bleak or enlightening read. I believe it is an unforgettable monument to endurance, one that offers a kind of fierce comfort. There’s something deeply powerful about Li’s determination to live with dignity and defiance through this extremity. And her desire to keep on writing or to master Chopin’s nocturnes for the piano suggests a woman who still desires to live in a state of wonder, if not exactly pleasure or peace.

Emotionally forensic ... Li invites her readers into her family’s world, as it was before the two boys were lost ... Li’s book doesn’t offer the consolation of wisdom gained, nor a triumphant arc of recovery. Where it finds reassurance is in its rigorous observation of reality. Although Li resists the idea that she might be offering advice or inspiration, her cool-headed clarity does remind readers that it is possible to say the words there is 'no good way to say'. In saying them, she finds a means of survival.

Li’s Spock-like, calm approach to life’s miseries evokes the stoics ... A more logical, philosophical affair ... What makes Nature so powerful and so frustrating at the same time — radical acceptance means accepting so much cruelty that we inflict on ourselves and others.

Quietly devastating ... Her book is a meditation on living and radical acceptance that has the potential to offer deep solace; comfort from the abyss.

This is trying terrain for a reader, as Things in Nature Merely Grow is not an uplifting book. But I marked many striking passages ... Li is a plainspoken, clear-eyed guide to the worst that a parent can endure.

What Li offers is wrenching honesty ... While 'words fall short,' [Li] continues to write.

For obvious reasons, the book is painfully bleak; it is not a triumph, it does not make meaning of these losses, though neither does it write them off as senseless. Even 'radical acceptance,' the phrase that will litter the book’s reception and promotion, is not an apt description of what Li seems to be doing or trying to render. Li quite clearly wishes to accept the choices her children made, and to love them in a way that allows for what they have done to be permissible to her, no matter how much it hurts ... While respecting the unknowability of her sons’ suffering and their separate decisions to end their lives, Li shows no acceptance toward the world itself, and least of all does she accept the failures of regular people, the inane ways most of us respond to tragedy, loss, and the suffering of others ... The book, as Li promises us at the start, offers no consolations. Reading it feels akin to watching a process begin to unfold, a bracing, a preparation, but the outcome is irresolute. Li recounts these self-destroying events at arms’ length, and what you feel most is the distance. This bleak world, newly revealed and horribly permanent, is a place where the most vital questions—How did this happen? What does this mean?—will never have meaningful answers. The only comfort to be found at all comes from resignation: there is no way out of life but through.

Intimate ... Li recounts both boys’ lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each ... She also details...her own battle with depression, which she recalls with wrenching immediacy ... Readers who’ve dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here.

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