Yiyun Li Turns to Music After Pulitzer-Winning Memoir of Loss

Yiyun Li won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Things in Nature Merely Grow, a memoir about the suicides of her two sons. Her next book leaves memoir behind. The novel, Music Against the Night, follows two young musical prodigies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The pivot tells us something about how Li works. When language ran out after her sons' deaths, she reached for music — the form that doesn't depend on words. Her new novel moves that impulse into fiction, and into a historical period when prodigy culture itself was being invented.

What changes between the two books?

The memoir is direct testimony: Li names what happened to her family and won the country's most closely watched literary prize for it. The novel reframes grief at a distance. Instead of writing about her own household, Li writes about two gifted children more than two centuries ago.

That distance is the mechanism. A period setting lets an author ask hard questions — what it costs to be exceptional, what adults ask of brilliant children — without the first person. The late 18th and early 19th centuries were the age of the performing prodigy, which gives the premise a concrete historical anchor.

Why music?

The NPR report frames the shift plainly: when words fell short, Li turned to music. Readers of the memoir will recognize the thread. Music shows up in the new book not as decoration but as the subject itself — the two prodigies at the center of Music Against the Night live inside it.

For Li, the move from memoir to historical fiction marks a return to the novel, the form she built her reputation on before the Pulitzer. The prize, awarded in 2025, cited the memoir's account of losing both sons.

The publication date and publisher details for Music Against the Night have not been announced. What's clear is the arc: a writer who documented the worst thing that could happen to a family, honored at the highest level, now testing whether music can carry what testimony already has.

(Photo credit: Hannah Yoon.)