Pulitzer Prize-winning author Yiyun Li has never felt comfortable with the vocabulary most people use to describe mourning. Terms like "grief" and the "grieving process," she argues, imply a journey with a finish line — a place where sorrow eventually loosens its grip and life returns to some recognizable normal. That has not been her experience. Instead, Li speaks of an "abyss," a word she says better captures where she expects to remain for the rest of her life.
That perspective is grounded in a decade of unimaginable loss. Li's two teenage sons both died by suicide, six years apart. Vincent died in 2017 at the age of 16. James died in 2024 at the age of 19. In the years between those deaths, Li, a celebrated fiction writer and essayist, found herself trying to make sense of a pain that language seemed ill-equipped to hold.
She chronicled that effort in her 2025 memoir, *Things in Nature Merely Grow*, which won the Pulitzer Prize. The book detailed the loss of both sons and her determination to keep living, not by moving past her sorrow but by learning to carry it. In an interview with NPR's *Fresh Air*, Li described the book as an account of how she attempted to go on after the unthinkable.
One of the memoir's central ideas is that suffering can be approached not as something to escape but as something to endure with greater skill. "James' death taught me to suffer better," Li said, explaining that she has learned she can live with her pain and sorrow without ever wanting to stop feeling it. For Li, the goal is not to numb herself or to heal in the conventional sense, but to remain fully present to emotions that many people would prefer to bury.
Her newest work turns in a different direction, though the themes of endurance and connection remain close at hand. Li's novel *Music Against the Night* is set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a period of dramatic artistic and intellectual ferment in Europe. The story centers on two prodigies whose lives become intertwined through music — a bond that ultimately also drives them apart.
The choice of music as a subject is significant for Li. In a moment when words failed to capture what she was living through, music offered a form of expression that did not depend on language at all. Music, unlike speech or writing, can convey feeling without translating it into sentences, and Li has said that when words fell short, music became a refuge and a mode of understanding.
Historically, the turn of the 19th century was an era when prodigies fascinated the public and when music was undergoing profound transformation. Composers were expanding the emotional range of the art form, and the figure of the gifted young performer — celebrated, scrutinized, and often isolated — became a cultural archetype. By placing her novel in this setting, Li engages with questions about talent, youth, and the cost of exceptional ability that resonate with her own concerns about fragility and inner life.
In the interview, Li also reflected on the limits of the language of recovery. Standard condolences and therapeutic frameworks, she suggested, often assume that grief is a problem to be solved rather than a permanent condition to be inhabited. Her insistence on the word "abyss" is a quiet rejection of that assumption, an acknowledgment that some losses reorganize a person's entire existence.
The memoir's Pulitzer recognition brought Li's story to a wide audience and prompted a broader conversation about suicide, bereavement, and the inadequacy of tidy narratives about healing. Her willingness to speak plainly about both of her sons' deaths — and about her own continued survival — has been noted by readers who have experienced similar losses and who find comfort in a voice that does not promise resolution.
Li's decision to follow the memoir with a historical novel may strike some as a departure, but it reflects a consistent artistic impulse. Across her fiction and nonfiction, she has long been interested in how people endure what cannot be fixed, and in the small, stubborn acts of attention that make a life bearable. Music, in the new book, functions as one of those acts: something made in defiance of darkness, not in denial of it.
The novel's two prodigies, brought together by their shared gift and separated by forces beyond their control, also echo Li's meditation on closeness and loss. Relationships built around a rare form of understanding can be intensely formative, and their dissolution can be as disorienting as it is inevitable. Li's fiction has often explored the ways people misunderstand and lose one another, even when love is present.
For readers familiar with Li's recent work, *Music Against the Night* is likely to be read alongside her memoir rather than apart from it. Both books consider how art — whether writing or music — provides a way to remain in contact with feeling when ordinary language proves inadequate. Both also refuse the consolation of a neat ending, choosing instead to sit with difficulty.
Li's appearance on *Fresh Air* marks another instance of her willingness to discuss publicly what many would keep private. Her comments about learning to "suffer better" are not a prescription for others but a description of her own practice: staying open to sorrow rather than shutting it down, and finding in that openness, paradoxically, a way to keep going.
If there is a through-line in Li's recent output, it may be this: that the deepest losses are not overcome but carried, and that art offers both a record of that carrying and a means of doing it. Her new novel, set two centuries ago among young musicians, suggests that this insight is not new — only newly and painfully known.
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