Because that's what writers do.
Putting the impossible into words
TW: Suicide
After my oldest son’s best friend killed himself—after two other unsuccessful attempts—I spent considerable time thinking about what we could have done differently. I had truly believed that words could save him. He was bright, an avid reader, and an aspiring writer. After the first attempt, when my son “saved” him, I collected quotes on surviving suicide from writers who had experienced suicide loss or suicidal ideation themselves and compiled them into a book which we presented to him in the hospital while he was in recovery.
I was pathetically naïve.
A few months later, after allowing himself some borrowed time, on the senior year registration day, he completed his mission.
As a writer, I cope with loss by turning inward and writing my through it, like burrowing through snow. You might not see it outwardly, but there is a maze of grief running through me. (Through all of us, I suspect.)
After about a year of false starts, I managed to write a passable first person essay addressing the friend. It’s published here. No, I don’t care to re-read it. It was a painful to live through and write about. It serves as a record now, but I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward.
***
Last year, on my quest to read more books, I put out a call: If you could only recommend one book, what would it be? I made a spreadsheet for myself and began working my way through it. Some books I had zero interest in but others rose to the top of my TBR pile. One such book was The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li. It’s about two French girls. I won’t say more because I don’t want to ruin it, but I do remember at the time thinking the story seemed far removed from Yiyun Li’s own upbringing in China.
Needless to say, I loved the book. After I’d finished it, I read a little about the author and discovered that she’d written an earlier “novel” (I’m putting it in quotes because while it’s classified as a novel, it doesn’t really conform to any of the genre’s conventions) that was a first-person conversation between a mother and recently deceased son who died by suicide, which, incidentally, mirrored the author’s own recent life experiences. I decided I might like to read it someday but I didn’t make any specific plan to do so.
Fast forward to the present.
Last weekend I was in a new-to-me bookstore in Escondido, doing what I call “bookstore tourism”—I seek out new bookstores when I’m in a new city—when my husband and I were on a weekend getaway. The store is chock-full of books, very organized, and with a focus on mainstream genre paperbacks, though smaller sections of hardbacks and vintage books were tucked away here and there. On one such bookshelf were a bunch of hardcover novels and among them I found Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li, the aforementioned novel. I immediately knew I was going to buy it.
I ended up with four books that day, but that was the one I took off the top to read first. I read it in about 48hrs. It was like nothing else I had ever read. There was no plot. It consisted solely of dialogue between the mother and her recently deceased son who were communicating in “aftertime” (think noon and afternoon) where the narrator herself existed in time and the narrator’s son in aftertime during a three month span immediately following the teenager’s suicide. I expected it to be hard to read but the voices were so present and so, well, alive, that I was drawn in and didn’t want to put it down. I could see it converted into play or radio play. The details about the son—his precociousness, his brilliance, his love of baking and knitting and the oboe—made me wonder how closely it aligned with the real son she had lost.
So I googled, “Yiyun Li son suicide”.
Imagine my shock and seeing that her second son, referred to in the novel by only a first initial, had himself just nine months before, while a freshman at Princeton where the author teaches, had also died by suicide.
Both sons, gone.
As a mother of two sons, I find myself even reluctant to write this. Like, I don’t want to jinx myself. But that’s ridiculous, right? There’s a lot more I could say but today I am writing because I was so moved by Where Reasons End, and now am flattened by this additional piece of news that I was oblivious to as I read the book.
And still, Yiyun Li keeps writing.
Because that’s what writers do.