Review: Anna DeForest on Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow”

On learning to suffer better

Now and Now and Now and Now

“There is this emptiness in me,” Yiyun Li writes in her 2017 memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. “All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing.” Displacement and abuse were defining conditions of Li’s early life, but her primary problem, as she describes it in the book, is more deeply irremediable than child abuse:
I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born.

Suicide is a central theme of the book: her recurrent desire for the relief of death, the people she has known who have died by suicide. While Li’s bleak thoughts do eventually drive her to several psychiatric hospitalizations, she never fully surrenders to the definition of her condition offered by psychiatry. One senses that Li sees intermittently considering suicide as a reasonable feature of serious people’s lives, especially the lives of those prone to feelings. How she survives—she wrote in 2017—is through meaningful work, reading and writing, the sense she gets from language that it can point toward the unknowable, that it can help us to live with and among things we can neither accept nor change. “I have to live in my own cautionary tale,” she confides. “Some people seek victory in that tale, others escape, yet others peace. I still do not know what I want from mine, but one hopes that to accept not knowing, for the time being, is better than to accept nothing.”

The memoir, her first, is strange and sensitive, easily glossed as a triumphant story of surviving despair and the enduring power of literature. Li’s body of work—five novels, three story collections, and five works of nonfiction—is a collection of plain-spoken explorations of the weight of living and the ways in which we construct ourselves out of the materials offered by our pasts. What solace I find in her work comes from the solidarity I have, or try to have, pretend I have, with others who were born without a strong sense that life is worth living, but choose somehow to live here anyway.