Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
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Li's teenage sons both died by suicide six years apart, Vincent in 2017 at age 16, and James in 2024 at age 19. Her Pulitzer-Prize winning 2025 memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow , chronicled the loss of her sons and her effort to go on.
Fresh Air
I have been taking piano lessons for two and a half years. I auditioned with my teacher with a book proposal rather than any skill on the piano.
Yiyun Li — Fresh Air
We assume that other people who are happy are in a fundamentally different situation than we are — that they have things we don't have, or they don't have problems that we do. But the research suggests that happy people have essentially found ways to make peace with the same kinds of problems and shortcomings that unhappy people struggle with.
Hidden Brain