Thank you to the publisher for allowing me to read and review this ARC. Full review to be found on Goodreads and on my website.

This is a great story that reflects how painful it can be for a mother to lose her child to suicide, this book has a very particular vocabulary from Lin's books, and I think whoever reads it first should know the author's story and understand How he writes so he can fall in love with his writing, this book basically shows how to handle the pain of grief and accepting a loss like this. Personally, I liked the book, but I feel that it falls short in showing the reality of these cases, especially today, when there are so many cases like this on a daily basis, mental health is a reality and you should not be afraid to talk about it. It is truly a thoughtful and moving story.

Gorgeous and gut wrenching, this portrayal of grief left my heart entirely on the floor and in a million pieces. It is honest and precise and poignant and honestly, words will never be enough. It showcases a breathtaking outlook on the unconditional love a mother has for her child and left me utterly devastated.

An imagined conversation between a mother and the teenaged son she lost to suicide - this book is not for the faint of heart. But it is a beautiful exercise in grief, mourning, healing, and loss. But knowing that this book mirrors the author's own life in ways makes it that much more powerful and achingly beautiful. It's a quick read but one that will stay with you for quite some time.

I thought this book was interesting, but could not find my footing nor was I really engaged. Perhaps it's just a consequence of the time, but I have to DNF this one all the same. Nevertheless, thanks for allowing me to read in advance — I really love the cover!

This is one of the most haunting and brilliant works about loss and language and the limits of both that I have ever read

Suicide is a frequent topic in Yiyun Li's last three works. She has attempted suicide herself and her last work detailed her depression, suicide attempt, and how to get through the darkest moments of one's life. In this novel, a young mother must confront her son's suicide. She does this by having a conversation with him. It's hard to tell if this is real or her imagination. She updates him about what's going on in her life, discusses things he liked and didn't like. She faces this devastation with a process. She skewers herself and her tendencies, but she also points out the deficiencies of her son. Instead of wallowing or being paralyzed with grief, she sits with it, she processes it. One gets the impression that she will have this conversation for the rest of her life.

NOTES FROM
Where Reasons End
Yiyun Li

April 3, 20192. Waylaid by Days

Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness.

April 1, 20194. Then the Button Came Undone

What’s wrong with being sharp and bright? Nikolai said. The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can. So you play a dumb version of yourself, he said. Are you suffering any less? Suffering, I thought, was a word that no longer held a definition in my dictionary.

April 1, 20195. Catchers in the Rain

Tones were what we were missing now, and without tones words were floating, gravity-less, missing one another or, worse, clashing without a warning.

April 1, 20195. Catchers in the Rain

In a game of luck, luck is already determined

April 2, 20196. What a Fine Autumn

I always imagine writing is for people who don’t want to feel or don’t know how to.

April 1, 20197. So Many Windows, So Many Flowers

Dig a hole and store a handful of delusions there, and dig another one and store more. Some delusions are for today. Some are for tomorrow. Some take a few months to ripen. Keep them dry so they don’t get moldy. Keep them private so others don’t step on them by accident or dig them up and steal them. Be patient. Delayed gratification is the key to a successful life of delusions. And if you’re lucky, some delusions become self-seeded. Some even go wild like dandelions.

April 1, 20198. The Perfect Enemy

Are some days more special than others, or are we giving them names and granting them meaning because days are indifferent, and we try to wrangle a little love out of them as we tend to do with uncaring people? These questions were not profound but they led to my halfheartedness about birthdays and major holidays. The others—anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, a parade of holidays on the Chinese lunar calendar—were just that: days where we live.

April 1, 20198. The Perfect Enemy

He used to bake on weekends and on the days when he did not have much homework. He used to bake all the time, and how could we reproduce all the time? Butter and cream and honey and cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg and clove and all the jars and bottles on his baking shelf: No one’s words, Proust’s included, could bring back to life their warm fragrance mixed with the scents of the winter rain of California and the wet eucalyptus leaves. You owe us an invention to immortalize scents, Mr. Edison. Without that our memory is incomplete.

April 1, 20198. The Perfect Enemy

Perhaps human history is driven by the desire to fight against our fadable and erasable fate, I said.

April 1, 20198. The Perfect Enemy

Imagination is a kite flown by reality, I said. Imagination doesn’t stand a chance if you cut the line held by reality.

April 1, 20198. The Perfect Enemy

One can stop being a parent or a child, a friend or an enemy, one can stop being alive, but one’s self does not stop being itself. Even death cannot change that. Death takes so many things away from us, but not that. Death is not invincible.

April 2, 201914. Consolation

Like finding an answer, a solution? You’re bad at giving answers, but I’ve found mine already. Like resolving time: a year into days, a day into hours, an hour into minutes, I said. But has it occurred to you that time thus broken down makes quicksand? he said. Yes, I’m fully aware of that, I said. And you still resolve to live on quicksand? What you call quicksand, I said, is our reality

April 2, 201914. Consolation

All those storms—I had thought we had weathered them together. But perhaps there is no true togetherness when some pains remain incomprehensible.

April 2, 201914. Consolation

There are a million things worth living for, I thought, including a little trick in baking.

April 2, 201914. Consolation

What if, I thought, we keep trying? What if an abyss can be made into a natural habitat? What if we accept suffering as we do our hair or eye colors? What if, having lived through a dark and bleak time, a parent can convince a child that what we need is not a light that will lead us somewhere, but the resolution to be nowhere, even if it’s ever and forever.

April 2, 201915. Never Twice

Tell me about it, I thought. It was exactly three months since his death. Seasons have changed. All lives in nature have changed themselves, as ordained by the seasons. It’s later and later and later and later for them, helpless as they are to want to make permanent any kind of now. A dear friend says we only count days and weeks and months with this intensity for two reasons: after a baby’s birth, and after a loved one’s death. Three months feel as long as forever, yet as short as a single moment when it’s now and now and now and now, so I must tell my friend that there is a difference between life and death. A newborn grows by hour, by day, by week. The death of a child does not grow a minute older.

April 2, 201915. Never Twice

What a terror, he said. No child likes to detect any trace of his parents in himself.

April 2, 201915. Never Twice

Yet what if moping is the exact thing that is needed for those who don’t mope, I thought. One doesn’t kill oneself while moping.

April 2, 201916. Answers Do Not Fly Around

What I’m trying to explain is this: Some people live by images, some by sounds. It’s words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.

April 2, 201916. Answers Do Not Fly Around

Writing fiction is to eavesdrop on your characters’ hearts.

April 2, 201916. Answers Do Not Fly Around

She asked you, in your imagination, what you wanted your novel to be. You said the main character outlived everyone so it was a book about the kindest revenge. She said that sounded cruel, and you said there was no cruelty, as the character had done nothing hurtful but to live on.
All Excerpts From


Li, Yiyun. “Where Reasons End.” Random House Publishing Group - Random House, 2018-08-07T15:36:31Z. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.

I’ve never had a child or lost a child and I think that made this book harder for me. Grief is slippery and so is this novel. As the speaker converses with her dead son about language and the nature time, I found myself getting lost. A good character introspection, but if plot-driven novels are your jam, skip this one.

Beautiful, lyrical.... and forgettable. Kudos to Li for undertaking what I'm sure was a harrowing experience in giving voice to her trauma: however, this fell someone what.

The enigmatic title of the book is emblematic of its tone: a mother loses her son and loses much of her reason. Her reason for performing certain daily tasks is forgotten; her reason for continuing to talk to him beyond death is non-existent; his reason for choosing to die is unclear. The book is also very asymmetric, full of unclosed loops, unfinished arguments between Nikolai and his mother; there is no beginning, middle, or end. The mother refuses to go too far in her discussions with Nikolai. She often attempts to discern what he is, how much he can hear, where his ghost can go, whether or not he is in her head, but it is all just a method of distraction. All she is truly concerned with is having him around, just existing in some form or other. This is also without reason: what, exactly, is so good about the simple presence of another person?

Yiyun Li is a literary genius and one of the best writers of our times. The way she deals with this searing autobiographical novel is a reflection of her superior literary mind. There is no way one can read this book and not see this.

A few years ago Yiyun Li had a terrible breakdown after which she wrote Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. When she got better her oldest son, a teenager, killed himself. Just writing these words makes me feel I’m touching unfathomable pain. How do you write about this? If you are Yiyun Li, you write about this like no one else could.

The book is made up of conversations between the writer and her dead son, whom she calls Nikolai. The narrator repeatedly reminds us that the conversations are entirely inside her head, i.e., that Nikolai’s words are a product of her imagination. At the same time, with incredible literary skill, she presents Nikolai as having an entirely autonomous mind: his words are his. As a reader you are therefore asked to keep in mind these two incompatible realities: that all the conversations are a product of the writer’s brooding and that Nikolai speaks for himself.

The conversations are somewhat mundane. There is a kind of easy mother-son banter that speaks of their closeness. Nikolai is maybe a bit too acerbic for the American reader (Yiyun Li is Chinese-born but she writes in English), and it was interesting for me to take the cues for what is acerbic or not within this particular mother-son dyad from the mother’s reactions to Nikolai’s utterances. On occasion you find yourself cringing but the mother instead laughs delightedly.

In all the conversations there is a great deal of intellectual sparring between this quite young man and his much-accomplished mom, and you learn that he was an exceptionally gifted child. His gifts and his erudition come out clearly in the conversations, because these two were clearly people who kept their conversations at a high level of intellectual sophistication. I loved watching the game of intellectual and logical one-upmanship Nikolai leads with his mom, and how humble and undefensive she is with him, and how deeply she respects him. The novel gives absolutely no sense that this is a performance the mother concocts out of regret: it is apparent, at least to me, that their post-mortem conversations are similar to the conversations they had before Nikolai took his life.

In fact, where there could be regret or guilt or devastation there is instead the narrator’s pleasure of talking to her son.

And yet this novel is absolutely devastating. So much so that I had to read it in small installments. I have no child of my own so I cannot possibly imagine what it is like to have a young child take their life on your watch. I am however a child with a mother I have good rapport with, and I know that if I took my life she would not be able to go on (in fact I think she would be able to go on in the sense that she would not die or wither, but I know that the loss would take the wind out of her life). So I come to this from the child’s side, a child who knows her mom well. In the book, the narrator has moments of breathtaking grief, which she tries to keep from Nikolai not to impose a burden on him, but which Nikolai perceives anyway because, after all, he lives in her mind. This is writerly bravura on Yiyun Li’s part, this blurring of the lines between how much Nikolai knows of his mom’s mind because after all he is in it and what she gets to keep from him. Nikolai of course will have none of that sentimentality. Even when his mom gently probes into his current well-being, his motivations for taking his life, or his state of mind, there is profound unknowing (again, an unknowing on the part of the child that reflects unknowing on the part of the mother: she just can’t let herself go there; she can’t speculate that far).

Sometimes the exchanges are rather dry: Yiyun Li is an accomplished writer who writes in a language that is not native to her, while Nikolai is a writer (his mom returns again and again to his poems, which she judges to be very good) who probably has more native contact with the language than his mom does (I don’t know where he was born but it seems that most of his life was in the United States). They both delight in linguistic analysis: etymologies, resonances, what you can do with words, how you can modify words, how you can stretch language.

I do not know how Yiyun Li managed to make this novel so good. On the face of it, it should be dry, frustrating and shy of the central issue (why Nikolai killed himself). In reality it is a long love letter to an immensely gifted child who is dearly missed. It is a tremendously powerful act of utilization of the writer’s own grief to put the spotlight squarely on her departed son.

Surprising, quirky, heart-rending and so very clever. I loved this unique book, even when it broke my heart.

This story is devastating and powerful. It is a journey through grief, toward healing. It is an attempt to make sense of that which never will, and a story of the heart's inability to stop loving even when it hurts.

Yiyun Li is a writer to wrestle with as she herself wrestles with words and with grief. Where Reasons End is a conversation between a woman and her son, who has died by suicide, but it is really a conversation Li is having with herself about the limits of language and time. Li’s books are not easy, they are not always gratifying, and their meanings are rarely self-evident—in this one, as you grasp for solid answers, you often get the sense of trying to wrap your fingers around a shadow or the abyss.

Compare this book to something like Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s account of the loss of her daughter: Where Reasons End is not nearly so tidy and lacks that book’s literary polish and aesthetic catharsis, but Li probably gets much closer to the truth (whatever that may be) in her own unruly, imperfect way. “Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.” This is certainly a book worth grappling with, however reason-less it may be.

I really enjoyed this book! I think that it was a beautiful story about a mother's love. It definitely reminded me of Joan Didion's "A Year of Magical Thinking" in regards to loss, but it was the loss of a child, which is absolutely heartbreaking (not that Joan's was not, just that the heartbreak is different). Though I am not a parent yet, I of course am someone's child, and I know that the loss would resonate with my father especially. He has always told me that if I took my own life, I'd in turn be taking his, because I am his life. I definitely felt that in this novel.

I loved this. I don't have much else to say so I'm going to repeat myself. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this.

Suicide of a child is a parent’s nightmare and Yiyun Li’s novel Where Reasons End is a beautiful painful conversation between a mother and her dead son. Knowing that Li experienced this in her real life just broke me. With 192 pages this is a tough book to read for any parent, so I suggest read with caution. But this is one I would highly recommend. Thank you, Netgalley Random House, for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Where Reason Ends is one of the saddest yet most beautiful books I have read. It is one that will make you cry but also profoundly move you.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

I don't have words to describe this book, I knew it was going to be hard reading this book but OMG, once I started reading it was way harder than I thought. There are no words to describe how I feel after finishing it, my heart was broken reading it, my heart is still broken after finishing it. I am a mother myself and I can't ever imagine the pain and I don't what to think about it.


I'm just going to give 5 stars and recommend it

This was..... sad. I struggled to finish it although the writing was very beautiful. At times hard to follow and a bit confusing.