Why We Turn Grief Into Art

Obtain a transcript.Hear and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You ListenSign as much as obtain our weekly cultural-recommendations publication.Yiyun Li’s “Issues in Nature Merely Develop” is a bracingly candid memoir of profound loss: one written within the wake of her son James’s loss of life by suicide, seven years after her older son Vincent died in the identical means. On this episode of Critics at Giant, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz talk about Li’s guide, which reads alternately like a piece of philosophy, a textual content of narrative criticism, and a devastating account of inauspicious details. The hosts additionally take into account different items, from the poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Tim Dlugos to a current crop of standup-comedy specials about grief, and ask what such artwork can provide us in our present second of turmoil. “Li is right here as a form of messenger, I feel, to explain one of many farthest factors of human expertise,” Schwartz says. “This guide is, in that means, elegant: phrases fail and fail and fail, however nonetheless they do one thing.”Learn, watch, and hear with the critics:“Issues in Nature Merely Develop,” by Yiyun Li“The place Causes Finish,” by Yiyun Li“ ‘My Disappointment Is Not a Burden’: Writer Yiyun Li on the Suicide of Each Her Sons,” by Sophie McBain (the Guardian)“The Yr of Magical Pondering,” by Joan Didion“Easy methods to Lose Your Mom: A Daughter’s Memoir,” by Molly Jong-FastJohn Cale and Lou Reed’s “Songs for Drella”“Marc Maron: From Bleak to Darkish” (2023)“Sarah Silverman: PostMortem” (2025)“Rachel Bloom: Loss of life, Let Me Do My Particular” (2024)“Rachel Bloom Has a Humorous Music About Loss of life,” by Alexandra Schwartz (The New Yorker)“In Memoriam A. H. H.,” by Alfred, Lord TennysonThe AIDS Memorial Quilt@theaidsmemorial on Instagram“G-9,” by Tim DlugosNew episodes drop each Thursday. Comply with Critics at Giant wherever you get your podcasts.