After losing her sons, Yiyun Li learned to ‘suffer better’

This is Fresh Air. I am Terry Gross. The words grief or the grieving process are Are not words writer Eun Lee chooses to describe her own feelings. To her, those words make it sound that at some point You emerge from grief. She prefers to use the word abyss.

which is where she expects to be for the remainder of her life. That doesn't mean she's incapable of laughter or even joy. But she expects to return to that abyss. Her teenage sons both died by suicide six years apart. Vincent at age sixteen and twenty seventeen. and James at age nineteen in twenty twenty four. She wrote an eloquent memoir about that published last year titled

Things in nature merely grow and It won a Pulitzer Prize. That's among the many honors she's received for her fiction and nonfiction, including the Pen Faulkner Award, the Pen Hemingway Award, And a MacArthur fellowship. Popular known as the Genius Grant.

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