“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged,” Yiyun Li writes near the beginning of her memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. “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.” Li’s 2019 novel Where Reasons End was her “book for Vincent.” Things in Nature Merely Grow, from which the following essay has been adapted, is her “book for James.”
The first time I used the word abyss to describe my life was when I was in a psychiatric ward in New York, where I stayed for three weeks after a suicide attempt in 2012. Life after a major crisis stands preternaturally still, the way I imagine the windless calm in the eye of a hurricane—this I would one day learn from Vincent’s death, and learn again from James’ death, but the first time that stillness beset me was in that New York hospital.
My mind was distant from my body; both were distant from that essence which I would call my self. The day after my arrival, when my brain was less foggy, I went to the nursing station and asked for a pen and a student’s exercise book. Sometimes I put a single word on a page. Or a combination of words. Or a line of a poem from ancient China—I had memorized hundreds of poems when I was growing up, an activity that I had known by instinct would set me apart from people around me. In the hospital the pen and the notebook were my habitat, as those volumes of ancient poetry had been for me when I was ten, twelve, fifteen. A habitat is not always a place of security, but it offers a possible hiding spot. There is no guarantee of safety; only, a better chance at eluding the predators.
Then my friend Tom came to visit, and he brought with him War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and an essay collection by Montaigne. My mind became less agitated, and I felt less estranged from myself: those books, made of words not mine but known to me for years, became a refuge.
Words, words, words. Words form castles on the solid ground and in the clouds, words become armors and prison walls, words make riptides and quicksands. One can never take words for granted; one cannot always trust words; and yet, where else can my mind live but in words?
A few hours after my appearance in the ward, a middle-aged woman peeked in through the half-open door of my room. (No door on a psychiatric ward is closed during the day, or locked at night.) “I washed my hands before I went to get this for you,” the woman said, and held out a pair of disposable underpants, folded as though it were a precious gift.
I did not know if I should decline. She put the offering into my hands and then sat down on a chair to talk about herself. There was nothing wrong with her, she wanted me to understand, just as she could see there was nothing wrong with me. Circumstances, however, made it necessary that she must stay in the hospital. “People in Washington, DC, are after me,” she said. “That’s why I’m hiding out here.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Don’t you worry. I have people in Washington who are watching out for me, too,” she said, winking at me.
Around me, from morning to night, was the sometimes symphonic but more often disharmonious orchestration of thirty women who all lived in various degrees of despair. When freedom was lost, when sanity was lost, and when reality was lost, words became one of the few possessions that could not be taken away. No one’s life was entirely private. Everyone had a story, and many of the women were eager to tell their stories to me, which, instead of broadcasting some special qualities about me, reflected, I suppose, the desperate need for everyone to speak and the lack of anyone willing to listen—this, certainly, is not a phenomenon specific to a psychiatric ward. In civilian settings outside the hospital, I’ve often found myself to be the recipient of people’s life stories.
“Get thee to the nuttery,” a cartoonist friend jokingly messaged me the other day. Isn’t the world the most inclusive nuttery? Very few people are like Bartleby or my children; very few people will say: I would prefer not to.
Perhaps everyone I met in that ward deserved a novel; I knew I was not the one to write them. “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, a comedy for those who think,” said a mind from the past (credited variously as Horace Walpole, Jean Racine, Jean de La Bruyère). Going by that saying, nearly every person in that ward was living in a tragedy: feelings, reliable or unreliable, were abundant among the inmates. I say nearly everyone because I did not count myself among them: thinking, rather than feeling, was what led me into that world behind a metal door with a sign that warned: elopement risk.
Earlier that year, when I tried to wean myself from an antidepressant, my mind slipped into unreality, which was made of thought and logic, only thought and logic that I now know—and perhaps knew even then—could not be trusted. “Brain chemistry manifested as a cognitive crisis,” a doctor explained in the hospital. “We are all bags of chemicals,” my friend Elizabeth said recently.
And yet I could not untangle myself from that unreality. Every Saturday, after James’ piano lesson and Vincent’s tennis lesson, we had lunch at a quaint place called Caffe Trieste in Berkeley, sitting in the sunny breeze, chatting about nonsensical things. I remember watching Vincent savor the lava cake, which was a favorite for us all; I remember relishing James’ joy when he cut the giant meatball in half. I remember talking and laughing with the children, going over the grocery list with my husband, and sometimes turning to the TV on top of the counter, which was often tuned to European football matches. I remember also feeling coldly detached from myself, from the world around me, including my children.
For months the shell that was me continued to live, taking care of my family, teaching, writing, going out on book tours, reporting to jury duty, taking our new puppy to training classes, but my thinking self was outside that shell, watching with indifference. Which of them was me, which was my twin; the twin who I had once been told existed in the room next door but whom I had never seen?
Which was the real me: the one who had always striven to be wise and kind and calm, or the one who felt a profound indifference to all those efforts?
If my children cannot stop me from slipping into unreality—I thought then, looking at the boys, who at ten and seven seemed to be living in a moment of great hilarity, with endless jokes and laughter—if this will not save me, nothing will.
And nothing did. Six months later, I was in that psychiatric ward. Once I opened the books Tom had brought me, the world of chaos retreated. There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books, however, offer the approximation of it. When I began to write in the student’s exercise book again, my words became more coherent, less entrapping. Writing, too, offers the approximation of salvation.
An old woman, who had spent most of her days conversing with her dead family members, asked me once what I was writing in my exercise book, and I showed her the word abyss on a new page. She squinted at the word for a long moment and sighed. “Abyss, abysmal, abysmally,” she said. “I feel abysmal, yes, I feel abysmal. Do you feel abysmal? Abyss, abysmal, abysmally.”
I too felt abysmal, and it was in that moment I realized that abyss, like bliss, is hard to communicate to another person. No one’s abyss is more or less abysmal than another person’s, just as no one’s bliss is more or less blissful than another person’s.
The old woman wore a pair of ruby-red shoes that she had picked up from donations to the patients. The shoes did not fit, and she would break into tears because her feet hurt, or her body ached, or the medications froze her brain, or her sister would not come back to answer her questions—among the dead people she argued with, the one she argued most often with was her sister, a fact I gathered from sitting next to her and listening to her monologue.
A young woman had fashioned a piece of black-and-white plaid tablecloth around her paper gown as a miniskirt. She always asked politely if she could tag along when I was taking a walk. It took thirty steps to walk from one end of the hallway to the other, and in the days before I started reading I walked and counted my steps until I reached ten thousand.
The young woman was from Bosnia, and during the Kosovo War, her mother, who was from Kosovo, had walked out on the family and returned to her home village. The young woman was twelve then; and since her mother left she had not seen or heard from her mother again.
Day after day she waited for me to put down my books so she could walk with me. She talked about her mother and the summer days in Bosnia, she talked about her older siblings, who were scattered around the world, and she talked about her ambition to become an actress one day. At one point she paused and assessed my outfit. I was wearing a T-shirt Tom had brought, which had Tom’s book cover printed on it: an extraordinarily beautiful woman with a lost look in her eyes. The young woman studied the T-shirt and shook her head. “Once you leave here, you must buy some white shirts of the best quality, a very smart jacket, and roll your sleeves just to here.” She pointed to a position on her own skinny arm. Then she squinted at my glasses. “Yes, those are good frames, but when you leave here you should get new ones. You should only wear Prada.”
Memories of her mother, aspirations and plans for the future, the miniskirt—none of them solved the young woman’s problems in that present moment. “I’m not mad,” she said to me. “I got my heart broken by a man. But now they’re not letting me leave.”
I am not mad—Constance says that when she mourns the young Arthur, and every woman in that ward said that, too. And yet every single woman there was in an abyss. What is the difference between being mad and being in an abyss?
In the hallway I was not the only compulsive walker. A petite woman in her 60s, who wore a pink Chanel jacket and a matching skirt, walked away most of her time, too—very slowly, as she had an arm and a shoulder in a sling, and I could see the walking caused her physical pain. I did not know what kind of pain she suffered beyond that broken shoulder. She was the only woman who did not seek a conversation with anyone, and when she was approached by others, she had little advice to dole out.
We nodded at each other when we crossed paths, many times a day, but we rarely talked. Sometimes her adult daughter came to visit her, and sometimes her ex-husband, an old man in round spectacles, came. Once a young colleague was there. Whoever came to visit would walk the hallway with her, not talking much.
Had the woman in the pink Chanel suit decided to tell me her story, I would have listened to every single word, though perhaps my respect for her was the same as hers for me: we all live in stories that cannot be fully told; very few people in the world deserve our tears.
When Tom came to visit for a second time, he spoke about his own sojourn in a New York City psychiatric hospital not too long before. “There I turned the corner, and guess who was coming down the hallway? Joan Didion. Well, I thought to myself, if she hasn’t figured out about life, who else among us stands a chance?”
I recently reread The Year of Magical Thinking—and calculated. Tom encountered Didion a few years after the publication of that transcendent book. Writing, offering a transient refuge, is an approximation of salvation, nothing more. Who among us stands a chance facing an abyss?
And who among the writers I’ve loved has summoned up the abyss in the precise way that I’ve experienced it? There is no shared abyss; we each dwell alone in our own.
Adapted from Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. Copyright © 2025 by Yiyun Li. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.