Yiyun Li's moving autobiography, "Things in Nature Merely Grow" deservedly received this year's Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Do not envy Li of her honor wherein she unfurls the unimaginable pain of both her teenage sons' suicides. For those who've read Joan Didion's haunting memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking" and found it unforgettable as did I, Li's lyrical prose will resonate with you. For those who've read Joyce Carol Oates' "A Widow's Story" and were put off by the "TMI"and cool depiction of her husband's corpse as did I, Li's sensitive and thoughtful reflections will have substance. Both her sons lives, their personae, her life before their untimely deaths and the forever forward life without them is bared. Li's candor and sensitive relinquishing of her grief are borne bearable and made compelling in her layered telling of her own battle with depression and earlier suicide attempt. Amid the years the brothers shared and the years when younger brother James lived on without the friendship of his beloved older brother Vincent. The mundane quotidian of life's essential requirements and Li's chosen distractions: piano practice or lap swimming to mitigate her consuming unease provided her sustenance and succor. There is snide humor in the cynicism Li finds in platitudes and fatuous fortitudes offered by intended, benevolent well-wishers. The unusual and poetic title "Things in Nature Merely Grow" is itself fodder for curiosity and understanding. "...weeding, weeding, weeding and then one day giving up because weeds are part of nature, too, and things in nature merely grow." The juxtaposition of merely grow - the burden to comprehend one's loved one's will no longer grow older, experience more or surpass the abyss of misery bears gravitas. "Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicdeal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live, in order to live they grow when they can." Li's sobering and contemplative book took me outside my self-contained orbit. "Sometimes a mother and a child are like two hands placed next to each other: only just touching or else with fingers intertwined. Then the world turns, and one hand is left, holding on to everything and nothing that is called now and now and now and now." Li does not sugarcoat or succumb to her moroseness. "Death, particularly suicide, cannot be softened or sugarcoated." "I don't want an end point to my sorrow. Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will end when I reach the end of my life," I will carry Miyun's "Things in Nature..." in my psyche for as long as I am sentient. "No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of 'I love you' we can say to them. That too is a fact."
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