Why We Turn Grief Into Art
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.4 • 678 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow” is a bracingly candid memoir of profound loss: one written in the wake of her son James’s death by suicide, seven years after her older son Vincent died in the same way. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss Li’s book, which reads alternately like a work of philosophy, a piece of narrative criticism, and a devastating account of difficult facts. The hosts also consider other texts, from the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Tim Dlugos to a recent crop of standup-comedy specials about grief, and ask what such art can offer us in our current moment of turmoil. “Li is here as a kind of messenger, I think, to describe one of the farthest points of human experience,” Schwartz says. “This book is, in that way, sublime: words fail and fail and fail, but still they do something.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
“Things in Nature Merely Grow,” by Yiyun Li
“Where Reasons End,” by Yiyun Li
“‘My Sadness Is Not a Burden’: Author Yiyun Li on the Suicide of Both Her Sons,” by Sophie McBain (the Guardian)
“The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion
“How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir,” by Molly Jong-Fast
John Cale and Lou Reed’s “Songs for Drella”
“Marc Maron: From Bleak to Dark” (2023)
“Sarah Silverman: PostMortem” (2025)
“Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special” (2024)
“Rachel Bloom Has a Funny Song About Death,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)
“In Memoriam A. H. H.,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
@theaidsmemorial on Instagram
“G-9,” by Tim Dlugos
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| 0:00.0 | This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. |
| 0:09.5 | I'm Nomi Fry. |
| 0:10.6 | I'm Vincent Cunningham. |
| 0:11.7 | And I'm Alex Schwartz. |
| 0:13.1 | Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. |
| 0:18.4 | My friends, hello. |
| 0:20.0 | Hello. |
| 0:20.7 | Hi. Hello. How are you guys? guys? I mean, I've been better. |
| 0:24.9 | Yeah, it's hard times right now. A lot of us in the world are grieving. There are wars going on. |
| 0:32.6 | There are assassinations that have recently happened. We see news about very traumatic and stressful |
| 0:40.5 | deportations every day. So I think that many of us share this feeling that the world is changing |
| 0:47.8 | very fast and for the worse, and we don't have any control. So what I want to ask you guys just to start, to what extent do you guys turn to art in times like these to help make sense of these feelings? |
| 1:02.7 | I don't know if I turn to art to make sense particularly of these feelings. |
| 1:07.0 | Like it's not like I would necessarily reach for, say, war and peace to see how people have gotten through war. |
| 1:16.9 | You know what I mean? |
| 1:17.8 | Like it doesn't need to be a kind of one-to-one relationship, but I do think there is a comfort in thinking about the world being able to produce beauty or to produce meaning when things feel chaotic. |
| 1:36.3 | And I will note, too, that I decided to get off social media a couple days ago because it seemed to me the exact opposite of kind of like going |
| 1:47.8 | to art. And I love social media, no shade, but I think in times like these where everything |
| 1:52.9 | feels so crazy and horrible things are happening every second, for me it's better to go to the kind of like works that try to deal with things |
| 2:06.0 | from a perspective. |
| 2:09.4 | Not an immediate reaction. |
| 2:10.4 | Not an immediate reaction, exactly. |
... |
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