Tl;dr — A must read memoir for your TBR. Beautifully written and offers profound insights on the human condition. Regular readers know how much I love a good memoir. It’s an incredibly vulnerable act to share difficult and intimate parts of yourself with the world. It also seems as though it would be incredibly challenging to figure out how to put your experiences into a linear format for readers, or find some broadly applicable lesson learned that you can share. It doesn’t have to be that way though. Things in Nature Merely Grow is not a typical memoir in the narrative sense. Yes, it has a focus on a particular experience, something thematic to hold it all together. But it’s atypical in approach, at least from the many memoirs I’ve read. A deviation from the norm. Yiyun Li’s memoir is centered on the suicide of her sons; her experience of them and her perspectives on them. But what the memoir doesn’t do is pack up her tragedy in a tidy story of perseverance, silver linings, and triumphant overcoming. It’s more of a self-observation of moving through life after a mother’s children both decide to no longer continue living. Her tragedy is immense, and perhaps nearly impossible to understand. She does not attempt to give you anything but her experience. I cannot relate to her exact experience (I’m sure few can), yet her memoir was profound in its offerings. I’ve never before marked up a memoir so much. I usually read through as a story, perhaps highlighting a handful of sentences throughout. But Li writes so beautifully and has such deep insights into the human condition I found myself highlighting throughout every chapter. I’ve never related to the feelings in a memoir so much before. If you’re a fan of memoirs, I cannot recommend this one enough. It’s obvious why this won the Pulitzer Prize. What I cannot understand is why it took me a year to come across it so that I could read it. Certainly this book is making it on my top ten book list for 2026. Easily.