Not quite sure what compelled me to read these two memoirs one after the other, given that both deal with the topic of suicide (although the focus of the Toews is on her writing and how her life experiences have shaped that – those experiences include the death of her father and her sister by suicide). Anyway, it wasn’t the cry-fest I anticipated. In fact, not a tear was shed. Partly because Li has quite a different perspective on suicide than others I’ve come across, and in reading Toews, I was marvellously distracted by her plans for a wind museum.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

Li’s memoir is described as a ‘defiant work of radical acceptance’ as she reflects on the death by suicide of her sons Vincent and James.

There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them. Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.

Li focuses on the failing of language to describe her unfathomable losses –

Those ancient Greeks sing their grief at the highest pitch, which…is rage. Their grief and their rage are nearly untranslatable, as though feelings in extremity can only be physical sensations – the language assails the readers with a blind and blunt force.

Unable to find the words, she states that she decided to write the book ‘…starting with a single established fact: I am in an abyss.’ However, facts and a ‘mother’s intuition’ seem to be in conflict –

Intuitions are narratives about potentials, possibilities, and alternatives. In that sense, intuitions are fiction, until, once confirmed by life, they became facts.

The focus on language lands on Li’s resistance to one particular word: grief – ‘…it seems to indicate a process that has an end point… people ask where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything as all about losing someone… I don’t want an end point to my sorrow… What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?‘ She goes on to say –

I am not a grieving mother. I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up.

At the crux of Li’s understanding of her sons’ deaths is the family’s long-held belief in, and respect for, free will.

…despite our not knowing enough of James’s thinking, what we could be certain of was this: he knew that we would respect his decision to take his own life, and he trusted that we would endure his death, as we had done it once before.

And it is this ‘acceptance’ that makes Li’s memoir quite different to anything I’ve read before.

There is much more to this book – Li also discusses her own mental health history, her relationship with her mother, and the bond that Vincent and James shared. So although short (172pp), it’s incredibly complex because she challenges the usual narrative around suicide. For that reason, it’s difficult to know who to recommend this book to – I think those who need it, will find their way to it.

Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.

4/5

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews

The memoir begins with Toews being pressed (by a literary festival organiser) to answer why she writes. From there she follows multiple subconscious threads – her relationship with her parents; the grief and futility connected to her sister’s suicide; her failed relationships; her dreams of opening a wind museum (I’ll get back to that).

I think about my older sister. Raucous laughter and bewildering silence, like my father. Two gears, first and fourth, my mother said. But there were times in between those gears. My sister spent time in second and third gear, too. I watched her closely. But closely enough?

Toews offers the reader glimpses of her truth, before distracting with observations on nature, her children and grand children, her home. The overall effect is being lulled along, only to be jerked to attention by a startling detail. Toews owns this, stating repeatedly that she’s never sure if her life is a comedy or a tragedy.

My partner E said last evening: I know you people (meaning, my family) don’t talk about your pain; you just kill yourselves. My daughter G and I were impressed with the genuine comic worth of that statement.

And to the wind museum. She introduces the idea on page ten. Just a brief mention in relation to a derecho that can turn a sky green. I marked the passage because I wanted to think about the possibility of a wind museum more, and also to look up pictures of green sky. Happily, there’s lots more about the wind museum in later pages, which had me thinking about what it represented for her (perhaps trying to somehow capture the impossible? Pin down the thing that can’t be pinned? Is this related to not being able to identify where her father and sister were at, before their deaths? Am I overthinking?).

I won’t have a trade wind in my museum. A reliable and predictable wind? In my museum? No.
Abrolhos. Alize. Bora. Brickfielder. Calima…

It also had me thinking about the logistics of the museum. I discussed it with my daughter who felt it would be a museum for a niche (small) audience. I said, “I’d go and I bet you’d go too…”. She didn’t reply (which I took as yes, she’d go).

What will I name my Wind Museum? Just ‘Wind Museum’? Is that catchy enough? Or: The Winds of the World. International Wind Headquarters. All the Winds of the World, Under One Roof!

I’ll be thinking about this book for some time but again, not sure that I will be pressing it on others.

3.5/5