
Things in Nature Merely Grow
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Toren
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By:
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Yiyun Li
About this listen
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.
“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this audiobook.
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”
There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2025 Yiyun Li (P)2025 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“In this intimate memoir, novelist Li remembers her teenage sons, James and Vincent, after their deaths by suicide . . . Li recounts both boys’ lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each . . . Readers who’ve dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here.”—Publishers Weekly
“Li manages the near impossible in a complex memoir that is as devastating as it is searingly insightful into the contours of grief and acceptance, recommended for anyone who is navigating the nonlinear timeline of loss.”—Greta Rainbow, Bustle (Best New Books of Spring)
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By: Yiyun Li
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Remembering Awake
- How to Love and Play Creation with Y/our Soul
- By: Julie Foster MD
- Narrated by: Julie Foster MD
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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It is time for our soul to awaken to its true potential and collectively create a more loving reality. Remembering Awake is a guidebook on how to do that. It will help you understand how important and perfect your soul’s journey through time has been. It will help your mind relax and melt into harmony with all the dimensions of our consciousness. It will help you open the prisons your limbic system has placed you in and dissolve some of the amnesia that keeps you from remembering that only one unconditionally loving soul is here “playing Earth.
By: Julie Foster MD
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Kinder Than Solitude
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Angela Lin
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious “accident” in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, and avoids entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude
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Uninteresting, unsympathetic characters
- By Maureen McDaniel on 05-13-14
By: Yiyun Li
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Currency
- Friends, Trends, and Dividends
- By: Kiley Reid, Jia Tolentino, Emma Cline, and others
- Narrated by: Arden Cho, Kelly Marie Tran, Helen Hunt, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Inequality. Influence. Fraud. Sabotage. These are the themes of great fiction and our modern economy. In this collection of short stories by some of today’s most scintillating writers, the rich get poorer and the poor get richer. Yeah, right! From the heartbreaking to the hilarious, here are eight instantly classic battles over currency, class, privilege - and social distance.
By: Kiley Reid, and others
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The True Happiness Company
- A Memoir
- By: Veena Dinavahi
- Narrated by: Veena Dinavahi
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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It is hard for Veena Dinavahi to live while her classmates keep dying. The high-achieving daughter of loving Indian immigrants, Veena lives in a typical white American suburb—except for its unusually high suicide rate. For years, she tries to manage her mental health in all the right ways, but nothing seems to work. Until, on a late-night Google search, Veena’s mom discovers Bob Lyon—a sixty-year-old white man in the backwoods of Georgia who claims he can make her want to live again. He calls himself “The True Happiness Company” and, as their relationship progresses, “Daddy.”
By: Veena Dinavahi
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The Salt Stones
- Seasons of a Shepherd's Life
- By: Helen Whybrow
- Narrated by: Cassidy Brown
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of Vermont's Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner are presented with the opportunity to steward a two-hundred-acre conserved farm. Whybrow knows that "belonging more than anything requires participation" and radically intertwines her life with the land. Six months after purchasing Knoll Farm, they unload a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the field and Whybrow becomes a shepherd entering into "nature's constant cycle of life into death into life" and all its unexpected lessons.
By: Helen Whybrow
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Ripeness
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Moss
- Narrated by: Flora Montgomery
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home. Decades later, happily divorced, recently moved, and full of new energy, Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man.
By: Sarah Moss
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Heart, Be at Peace
- A Novel
- By: Donal Ryan
- Narrated by: Anne Marie Ryan, Ciaran O'Brien, Donal Ryan, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them
By: Donal Ryan
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Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
- Stories
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Angela Lin, James Yaegashi, Jackie Chung, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Yiyun Li, honored as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists under age 35, continues her illustrious career with this insightful collection of short stories. With compelling visions of the scrapes and unpleasant situations in which people find themselves, Li’s works trigger emotional responses of all types - whether through a tale of unrequited love, an unburdening of guilt, or something else entirely.
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Sometimes harsh, but always compelling
- By Dr. J. Adrienne Roth on 10-01-23
By: Yiyun Li
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Panic and Joy
- My Solo Path to Motherhood
- By: Emma Brockes
- Narrated by: Emma Brockes
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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When British journalist, memoirist, and New York-transplant Emma Brockes decides to become pregnant, she quickly realizes that, being single, 37, and in the early stages of a same-sex relationship, she's going to have to be untraditional about it. From the moment she decides to stop "futzing" around, have her eggs counted, and "get cracking"; through multiple rounds of IUI; to the births of her twins, which her girlfriend gamely documents with her iPhone and selfie stick, Brockes brings the listener every step of the way.
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It captured my emotion’s perfectly
- By ad 1981 on 02-22-25
By: Emma Brockes
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Composting Our Karma
- Turning Confusion into Lessons for Awakening Our Innate Wisdom
- By: Barbara Rhodes
- Narrated by: Erin Humphrey Konuma
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Barbara Rhodes offers the Korean Zen teaching of don’t-know mind as an antidote to the overthinking, overly-stimulating modern world that is the cause of so much suffering. Rhodes shows us that there are ways we can work with, or “compost,” whatever we’ve got in front of us, digest it into energy that can get us through the rough times, and cultivate a satisfying life. And she offers fascinating insights from her professional life as a nurse, commitment to engaged Buddhism, life experience as a member of the LGBTQ community, use of psychedelics on her spiritual path, and more.
By: Barbara Rhodes
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Your Steps on the Stairs
- A Novel
- By: Antonio Muñoz Molina, Curtis Bauer - translator
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their new home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, the man revels in the Portuguese capital's temperate weather and the neighborhood's calmness, meticulously planning the details of their future.
By: Antonio Muñoz Molina, and others
The truth of her experience
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Be careful with this
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Her deep and beautiful descriptions of sorrow
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Lovely and loving book about a Mother’s love for her children
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Heartbreaking and Beautiful
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Wow
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As for the book - well, all I will say is that it is among the most important books I have ever read (or, in this case, listened to). Thank you to author.
Bracing
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Beautiful, soft, painful, and enduring
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A series of facts.
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