Yiyun Li Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2025?   

The news came as a joyful surprise! It’s a great honor to be longlisted alongside some of the most exciting books published in 2025. The judging, I imagine, is a lengthy and interesting experience for the panel, as there are different approaches and subjects and topics covered by this term, non-fiction. And I like to imagine that my book, along with the other longlisted books, form a meaningful snapshot for this particular time we are living in, when the attacks on facts seem to be at an elevated level. 

You describe this book as “not about grieving or mourning.” How did you arrive at that framing, and what does it mean to you? 

People often talk about grieving or mourning as a process, sometimes with stages, as though it’s an experience that follows an arc, from darkness to epiphany, from pain to peace, or from struggling to acceptance. I know from my experience as well as from readers who have lost loved ones, particularly to suicides, that this so-called process is an artificial notion, which isolates the bereaved and sometimes adds pressures for the bereaved to conform to that arc. I started the book with the resolution to talk matter-of-factly about an experience often described to me as unfathomable, with this stanza from Wallace Stevens as my guidance: “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

Do you see parallels between the cycles of nature and the emotional rhythms of living with grief? 

I don’t want to overstretch to make a connection between nature and grief. The key to me is that word “merely” in the title. I garden so obviously I like everything beautiful in the garden. But a garden—and the nature beyond a garden—is never strictly under one's control, at the mercy of many elements. Not all things are beautiful in nature, but they are equally parts of nature—the flowers that bloom one day and wilt the next day, the upward growth and the rotting underneath, the honeybees and the hummingbirds and the aphids and the rodents. I suppose the way I approach gardening is the same as I approach my life: one does one’s best but must acknowledge one’s limitations. 

What do you hope readers take away from Things in Nature Merely Grow? 

For readers who have faced similar losses—I hope the book is a friendly gesture, with some solace, to say that it is all right to live in the abyss life has thrown us into and yet still find meaningful things and joyful moments. For readers who have not encountered such catastrophes, the book also offers my experience of living through a range of reactions from the world: from the most extraordinary and sustaining friendships to the most pernicious and cruel judgements. A book, to me, is always a mirror. And I hope this book is a mirror to reflect a reader’s feelings and thoughts to himself/herself. 

What did you find to be the main challenges of writing non-fiction and fiction? 

I write fiction more than nonfiction, and so fiction is a more natural habitat for my mind. I write a fair amount of nonfiction only because things happen to me—life happens to me. A writer’s job is to take what’s given by life—all things unexpected and insoluble—and find the best way to think through these things in writing. In that sense, I think fiction and nonfiction offer the same kind of space for me. The challenge is how to go as far as humanly possible in thinking and writing. 

If you could describe your book in three words, what would they be?

This is an impossible question for me to answer! Can I use four words—they are a chapter title in the book: A Matter of Facts.