As her memoir of losing her sons is published, the author talks about radical acceptance and how writing fiction helped her to prepare for tragedy
As the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him. Where Reasons End is a conversation, sometimes an argument, between a mother and her dead son, and it is a work of fiction that doesn’t feel fictional at all, because it’s also an encounter between a writer in mourning and the son she can still conjure up on the page. “With Vincent’s book there was that joy of meeting him again in the book, hearing him, seeing him, it was like he was alive,” she says. The book had 16 chapters, one for each year of his life, and Li felt she could have spent the rest of her life writing it, and also that she could not linger.
When her younger son James died in 2024, aged 19, Li wanted to write a book for him, too. James was harder to write for. Her sons were best friends but “such different boys”, she says. She and James did not argue in the same way as she did with Vincent, and he would hate to be thrust into the spotlight, or for her to write a “sentimental” book. James had a mind so brilliant that his inner workings were often unreachable – by seven or eight he’d open meal-time conversations with “apparently the Higgs boson …” or “apparently the predatory tunicates …”. He did not speak often, but could converse in eight languages and his phone was set to Lithuanian, a ninth. He once described Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant as the only book that captured how he felt about the world. If Vincent lived “feelingly”, James lived “thinkingly”, Li says, and she wanted her book for him to be “as clear as James, as logical and rational”.
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