We only judge parents who can’t fight back

Yiyun Li’s older son, Vincent, killed himself in 2017. He was sixteen. She wrote a book about him. Her younger son, James, killed himself in 2024. He was nineteen. She wrote a book about him too, and that one won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Between the two deaths were six years, and Li has described them herself: James was lonely for all six of those years, she said, with a loneliness no mother could do anything about. Vincent had been nearly the only person James talked to. After Vincent died, James mostly stopped talking. When James was six he told her he suffered from monophobia, an extreme fear of loneliness; he had looked the word up so he could describe himself to her accurately. And for the six years after his brother died, James didn’t cut his hair. He grew it the way Vincent wore his. She also tells us what she did during those years: “I did not stop writing or take time off from teaching.” People read that sentence as resilience. But it’s neglect, because there was a child…