Review by Booklist Review
Only Li can explain what happened. "There is no good way to state these facts . . . My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide." Two months after her older son died, Li finished "the book for Vincent." Where Reasons End (2019) "was published as fiction because it could only be called that: no dead child has ever come back to have an argument with his mother." This "book for James," she warns, "will not provide a neat narrative arc . . .This book will not provide the easy satisfaction of fulfillment, inspiration, and transformation." James' death requires "radical acceptance." For "dear readers" unable to accept words like "died," "death," who believe in the magic of "love" and "thy god," or for whom "suicide is too depressing a subject," then "stop reading," she advises. What Li offers is wrenching honesty. "I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James." While "words fall short," she continues to write. "What else can I do but to go on with the things I can do, to keep my body nourished and active and my mind occupied and sharp?"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this intimate memoir, novelist Li (Wednesday's Child) remembers her teenage sons, James and Vincent, after their deaths by suicide. Though she centers the account around James, who died more recently, Li recounts both boys' lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each. Li writes of marking her time after James's death with piano lessons, swimming, and gardening, and gradually coming to realize that death altered neither the facts about her sons nor her relationship to them. "In this abyss that I call my life, facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to," she explains. "It's not much, this holding on, and yet it's the best I can do." She also details childhood abuse at the hands of her mother and her own battle with depression, which she recalls with wrenching immediacy. Throughout, Li draws on references to grief in literature, including Shakespeare's Richard II and Euripides, though she ultimately refuses to call what she's going through "grieving" because it "seems to indicate a process that has an end point." Readers who've dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A memoir of living with the unbearable grief that followed the suicides of the author's two teenage sons. "I am in an abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss." So writes Li, novelist and memoirist, whose two sons, full of promise, took their own lives--one, she ventures, for reasons of emotion, the other for reasons of thought, both concluding that a "livable life" was not possible. Li recounts her own struggles with depression, struggles not lightened by the delight of a Chinese media that considered her, having left her homeland and taken up writing in English, richly deserving of such punishment. Li lives through words and books, and here, even in the most harrowing moments, she reaches for them to explain herself to herself: here Ludwig Wittgenstein and Euripides, there Shakespeare and Philip Larkin, often Albert Camus. Always her habitat is that abyss, "which is my life," marked by exhaustion, frustration, endless sorrow, and occasional bemusement, as when she notes that her older son died on the very day she put down a deposit for her new house in Princeton, the kind of coincidence that would seem unbelievable in fiction, on which she concludes, "Life…does not follow a novelist's discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life." Though elegantly written and deeply thought through, Li's book makes for emotionally difficult reading, offering little comfort for those who may be experiencing similar travails. "Both my children chose a hard thing," she writes, encapsulating the narrative as a whole. "We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths." As bleak as winter fog at dusk, suggesting that one goes on after tragedy only because there's nothing else one can do. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
