by Yiyun Li
First published 2025
Yiyun Li opens this memoir with stark facts. She and her husband lost both their sons to suicide. Vincent died in 2017 at sixteen. James died in 2024 at nineteen. Both died close to home. Li refuses to frame this as a story about grief. Instead, she builds a different kind of response to unthinkable loss. She gardens, reads Camus and Wittgenstein, learns piano, and searches for words that can hold space for James. Li rejects the conventional timeline that separates before and after. For her, Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. They remain parents in an eternal present tense. Li practices what she calls radical acceptance, choosing this stance over despair. The book becomes her attempt to live thoughtfully alongside death, to continue existing when existence itself feels impossible.
Genres: literary-fiction, family-life, grief, contemporary, memoir, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, non-linear-narrative
180 pages · Kindle Edition · Fourth Estate
Content warnings: child-death, suicide