Where Reasons End
Douban
Yiyun Li
overview
A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone.
Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child.
contents
1. Do Not Let Mother Dear Find Us (3)
2. Waylaid by Days (11)
3. The Trespassers (20)
4. Then the Button Came Undone (31)
5. Catchers in the Rain (41)
6. What a Fine Autumn (49)
7. So Many Windows, So Many Flowers (58)
8. The Perfect Enemy (69)
9. Forever (80)
10. Waylaid by Facts (91)
11. Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again (103)
12. Inertia (113)
13. Aftertime (125)
14. Consolation (136)
15. Never Twice (147)
16. Answers Do Not Fly Around (159)
