Things in Nature Merely Grow Won the 2026 Pulitzer for Memoir With Yiyun Li's Account of Losing Her Two Sons

You probably expect a memoir about losing a child to be a book of mourning. Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow is something harder and, in the end, more sustaining. Li lost both her sons to suicide: Vincent at sixteen in 2017, and James at nineteen in 2024. She does not ask you to grieve with her so much as to watch how she keeps living with the facts.

The book won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in 2025, and before the Pulitzer it had already won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and reached the shortlists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

Two sons, and a book addressed to James

Li addresses the book to James, her younger son. She writes to him directly about the years after his brother's death, about the life the family tried to rebuild and about the plain, unbearable fact of his own death six years later.

What makes the book so unusual is its refusal of the usual shapes of grief. Li does not search for a reason she can hold on to, and she does not offer you a lesson at the end. She treats the loss as something to accept rather than only to mourn, and she stays close to what happened, in clear and exact language.

Facts, language and the decision to carry on

Li fills the pages with the things that keep her going. She gardens. She reads Albert Camus and Ludwig Wittgenstein. She learns the piano. None of these is offered as a cure. Each is a way of living thoughtfully alongside death, of paying attention to the world while knowing what it has taken from her.

After the prize was announced, Li said she wrote the book out of her faith 'in language, in thinking, and in carrying on, despite the difficulties'. That faith runs through every page. The writing is austere and controlled, and its precision becomes a kind of defiance: Li will name things as they are, and she will go on.

A book written in the hardest years of a life

Li is a celebrated novelist and short story writer who teaches at Princeton University, and she has won a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Faulkner Award among many others. She brings a novelist's ear to this book, but none of a novelist's invention. 'The book was written during a difficult time in my life about a tremendous loss,' she said.

This is not an easy book to read, and you may want to take it slowly. It is also not a bleak one. The surprise of Things in Nature Merely Grow is how much life it holds, in its gardens, its music and its books. Li told Princeton that she was 'overwhelmed and shocked' when her editor called with the news, and she described the Pulitzer as a 'bittersweet honor'.

Women have won three of the four memoir prizes

The Pulitzer for Memoir or Autobiography is the newest of the book prizes. Until 2022, memoirs competed with biographies for a single award, and in 2023 the board gave memoir a prize of its own. Since then, women have won it three times in four years: Cristina Rivera Garza in 2024, Tessa Hulls in 2025 and now Li. Hua Hsu won the first memoir prize in 2023.

This year, women filled every place on the shortlist. The other finalists were Anelise Chen, with Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, an experimental memoir in which she reimagines herself as a clam to write about her father; Hala Alyan, with I'll Tell You When I'm Home, about diaspora, war, infertility and motherhood; and Sarah Chihaya, with Bibliophobia, on how a devotion to books can both sustain and endanger the self. The jury was chaired by Grace Talusan and included Hua Hsu.

Last year's winner also traced what passes between generations

The 2025 prize went to Tessa Hulls for Feeding Ghosts, an illustrated memoir that follows three generations of Chinese women and the trauma handed down through her family. Read the two winners back to back and you find the same subject approached from opposite directions. Hulls looks back at what her grandmother and mother carried into her life. Li looks at what a mother carries after her children are gone.

What stays with you after the last page

You finish Things in Nature Merely Grow with a strange steadiness rather than despair. Li does not tell you that loss can be overcome. She shows you, day by day, that it can be lived alongside, and that language, attention and small daily practices can hold a life together. It is a book that many readers will press into the hands of someone they love.

Read it if you have lived with loss and want truth rather than consolation, you love writing that thinks its way through hard questions, or you already know Li's fiction and want to meet the writer behind it.

If this piece has raised difficult feelings for you, Samaritans are available day or night, free of charge, on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland.

Buy the book

• Things in Nature Merely Grow on Waterstones
• Things in Nature Merely Grow on Barnes & Noble

Also in this piece

• Clam Down on Waterstones / Barnes & Noble
• I'll Tell You When I'm Home on Waterstones / Barnes & Noble
• Bibliophobia on Waterstones / Barnes & Noble
• Feeding Ghosts on Waterstones / Barnes & Noble

Featured Book

Feeding Ghosts

A Graphic Memoir

by Tessa Hulls

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. In ink drawings, Tessa Hulls tells the story of her grandmother Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist who fled the Communist victory of 1949, her mother Rose and herself, three women bound together by love, fear and a history nobody would talk about.

Waterstones

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Next in the series: Ars Poeticas by Juliana Spahr, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.