Why We Turn Grief Into Art

Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow” is a bracingly candid memoir of profound loss: one written in the wake of her son James’s death by suicide, seven years after her older son Vincent died in the same way. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss Li’s book, which reads alternately like a work of philosophy, a piece of narrative criticism, and a devastating account of difficult facts. The hosts also consider other texts, from the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Tim Dlugos to a recent crop of standup-comedy specials about grief, and ask what such art can offer us in our current moment of turmoil. “Li is here as a kind of messenger, I think, to describe one of the farthest points of human experience,” Schwartz says. “This book is, in that way, sublime: words fail and fail and fail, but still they do something.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li

“Where Reasons End,” by Yiyun Li

“‘My Sadness Is Not a Burden’: Author Yiyun Li on the Suicide of Both Her Sons,” by Sophie McBain (the Guardian)

“The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion

“How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir,” by Molly Jong-Fast

John Cale and Lou Reed’s “Songs for Drella”

“Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark” (2023)

“Sarah Silverman: PostMortem” (2025)

“Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special” (2024)

“Rachel Bloom Has a Funny Song About Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)

“In Memoriam A. H. H.,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

@theaidsmemorial on Instagram

“G-9,” by Tim Dlugos 

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Critics at Large is a weekly discussion from The New Yorker that explores the latest trends in books, television, film, and more. Join us every Thursday as we make unexpected connections between classic texts and pop culture.

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