Yiyun Li won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2025 memoir, Things in nature only grow.
Hannah Yoon/Macmillan
hide caption
Hannah Yoon/Macmillan
If you or someone you know is considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text. 988 to reach the lifeline Suicide & Crisis.
Writer Yiyun Li doesn’t talk about “grief” or the “grieving process.” For her, these words give the impression that at some point, we emerge from grief. Instead, Li prefers to use the word “abyss,” which she says is where she expects to be for the rest of her life.
Li’s teenage sons both committed suicide within six years of each other, Vincent in 2017 at age 16 and James in 2024 at age 19. His memoir, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2025, Things in nature only grow, chronicled the loss of her sons and her efforts to carry on.
“James’ death taught me how to suffer better,” she says. “To say, ‘I can do this, and I can live with my pain and my grief and never want to stop feeling.'”
Li’s new novel, Music against the night, takes place in the late 1700s and early 1800s and focuses on two prodigies brought together by music and separated due to their aspirations. The novel focuses on music, which lies outside of words.
“I think I’ve had the feeling every time after my children’s deaths that words are often insufficient, and that not being good enough doesn’t mean not succeeding, not being good enough doesn’t mean failing,” she says. “But when I start a new project, I would like a subject (where) words are naturally not enough. So music is that choice.”
Li grew up in China and served a year in the Chinese military before coming to the United States to study immunology. She ultimately abandoned her doctorate. program to become a writer. Li is now a professor in the creative writing program at Princeton University.
Interview Highlights
On the decision to fix Music against the night in a different period
I was halfway through the novel when James died. It’s a novel far from my usual interests or concerns, and the reason I think I returned to history is that I would like to relive history, through historical figures, through my characters living in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. …I am making the past new now for me and perhaps for my readers.
How playing the piano is linked to his grief
I started my piano lessons at the end of 2023, purely to learn how to play the piano. And James died in February 2024, so two months after I started my piano lessons, he passed away, and I realized that piano or music was a good way for me to count time – because music is about time. It’s about counting the measure, counting the rhythm. And also music is… being engaged in something else. You can sit in your sadness all day, do nothing, or cry. Or, like me, I could just sit there and play the same exercise over and over again, to know that I was, in some way, connecting with the world. …
I’m not a concert pianist, but somehow I find it liberating and healthy to do something you absolutely love but can’t do well. Every time I go to my piano class, I’m so intimidated. I’m sweating because I can’t do it. I can hear others do it, I can’t do it myself. But I think it’s, again, recognizing the limits of my abilities.
On raising two gifted children
Both of my children could be described as prodigies, but James, my youngest son, was particularly extraordinarily strange and brilliant. …We were very disconcerted. I remember when he was 5 or 6, he said, “Mom, you’ll never see the world. I see it full of dots and wavy lines.” And this was again a strange perception of the world to which we adults did not have access. …
What is the responsibility or difficulty of raising a child (who is) very bright? … Some people would say, well, we really have to train him to be the next Einstein, but we didn’t want him to be the next Einstein, we want him to be a normal, happy boy living an ordinary life.
On his son Vincent
He was a brilliant painter and we still have all his paintings in the house. He was an oboist and when he wanted to learn the oboe, the oboe teacher said that he was a bit young, because he was 8 years old when he wanted to learn the oboe, but he was sure. … (He had) started on the piano and he could articulate that the piano was not his instrument. He wanted to play the oboe. But above all, he wrote beautiful poetry. He was a great poet. And he was a bigger reader. I wouldn’t call him exceptional, like James was, but he was brilliant, funny and interesting.
On fighting suicidal thoughts
Sometimes I think people have all kinds of thoughts about or against people who have chosen to commit suicide, and people who have chosen or attempted suicide are often called selfish. But in my experience, people are often in great pain, whether it’s great mental pain or great physical pain. And sometimes people in deep depression cannot tell the difference between mental pain and physical pain, because all of these together add up to great suffering. I think it’s not that people feel this kind of suicidal urge, it’s not that they want to die or that they want to (use) this to hurt other people.
Become a writer
I was born with an innate curiosity and also a sensitivity to things that didn’t really make sense. So I grew up in China. And for example, when I was little, all the adults said, since you’re a child, you don’t have the right to decide who you want to be or what you want to do. And my mother even had a saying, something along the lines of what an adult decides and the child follows. I was quite young, you know, 4 or 5 years old. I just couldn’t understand all these teachings because I thought I was as capable of thinking as adults, and why did I have to follow them? So I think that kind of sensitivity to things that are very, very absurd, I think that’s maybe one thing that made me a writer.
Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
