These Five-Star Memoirs Go Best Together

I’ve been on a memoir kick lately and these slim volumes left a deep impression on me. In many ways, they feel in conversation with each other.

"Things in Nature Merely Grow" by Yiyun Li and "Memorial Days" by Geraldine Brooks both grapple with the long, unresolvable work of grief: Li after the deaths of her two sons (both by suicide, six years apart), and Brooks after the sudden death of her husband. There are no sweeping emotional revelations or neatly drawn conclusions in these books. They are contemplative more than cathartic, attuned more to the texture of thought than to narrative momentum. There’s a clear refusal in each to sentimentalize or simplify loss.

Li’s voice is stark, distilled, and philosophical in tone. Her approach is stripped of metaphor and fiercely honest because she believes that’s how her son James would have preferred it. There’s an intellectual rigor to how she considers loss, but also an undeniable ache beneath it.

Brooks, by contrast, is more expansive and sensory, blending memories of her marriage with travelogue. Her book is ostensibly grounded in place — the home in Martha’s Vineyard she shared with her husband, the countries far and wide where they worked as foreign correspondents, the remote Australian island where she has retreated to mourn three years after his death. Her writing is less austere than Li’s, but no less affecting.

Uncannily, Brooks quotes a 2023 New Yorker piece by Li in her afterword, which I read after I’d already begun to think of their books as companions. Li writes, “The predicament when writing about a sudden, untimely death: the more you remember, the more elusive that death becomes.” Brooks gently disagrees. For her, remembrance is a form of reentry — a way to slow time, to suffer consciously, to be fully present in loss.

I didn’t set out to read these books side by side, nor did I expect to be so moved by that experience. But they deepened one another in ways I’m still unraveling. Their views on grief, though at times at odds, don’t cancel each other out. If anything, they reinforce one another, revealing the many shapes loss can take and the ways writing might help carry its weight.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ x2