A writer talks with her teenage son. The son is dead, but they talk anyway.
There is nothing supernatural here—no lingering ghost, no gauzy dream. Just language. Through words on a page, she has found a place where she can speak with him and he can speak with her. Of course, his words are her words. She puts them there. He is, in a sense, her creation. Just as he was in life.
Yiyun Li’s new novel, Where Reasons End, is only this, an ongoing conversation between a mother and her son, after he has committed suicide.
She remembers his capable knitting, his obsession with blueberries. He reminisces with her, he chides her like a teenager would. They argue over semantics.
In reality, Li did recently lose her teenage son to suicide, after struggling with suicidal depression herself. “I was almost you once,” she writes, “and that’s why I have allowed myself to make up this world to talk with you.” PLEASE READ
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li, from Random House
