
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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Story
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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Story
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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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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Ragged Company
- By: Richard Wagamese
- Narrated by: Monique Mojica, J. D. Nicholsen, Benjamin Blais, and others
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Four chronically homeless people - Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger - seek refuge in a warm movie theater when a severe Arctic front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world and, once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing “the same story over and over again” in favor of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck.
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The Author Once Said This Was His Favorite
- By Emunah Herzog on 10-01-21
By: Richard Wagamese
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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.”
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Could not stop listening!
- By Pen Name on 07-06-25
By: Veena Dinavahi
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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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Last Stories
- By: William Trevor
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor is regarded as one of the best writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in Last Stories, the master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered tales - nine of which have never been published in book form - that illuminate the human condition and will surely linger in the listener's mind. This final and special collection is a gift to lovers of literature and Trevor's many admirers, and affirms his place as one of the world's greatest storytellers.
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William Trevor's Last Literary Gems
- By W Perry Hall on 07-01-18
By: William Trevor
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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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The Family Outing
- A Memoir
- By: Jessi Hempel
- Narrated by: Jessi Hempel
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Jessi Hempel was raised in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. But the truth was far from perfect. Her father was constantly away from home, traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Growing up, Jessi and her two siblings struggled to make sense of their family, their world, their changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. And each, in their own way, was hiding their true self from the world.
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Learned “Coming Out” is not what I always thought…
- By Lou on 01-27-23
By: Jessi Hempel
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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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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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
The truth of her experience
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Very Moving thoughtful meditation on tragedy and grief.
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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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