NOT A MEMOIR, but not exactly autofiction either. Where Reasons End is a book-length dialogue between Li and her 16-year-old son, who died of suicide. The dialogue is not recalled conversations from when her son was alive, however, but conversations that took place after his suicide..."took place" may be inaccurate, since they occurred only in Li's imagination. The book looks to the past in the ways a grief memoir does, but is set entirely after his death.
Gah. Hard book to describe. But the concept is readily grasped as one reads.
Not that one would call it an easy read--it's painful. I can't imagine what it took for Li to conjure up the voice--the mood, the memories, the sensibility--of the son she had lost this way. But she has done an absolutely convincing job. Nikolai is as real a 16-year-old as one will find in any novel: prickly, given to absolute statements, willing to debate finer-than-fine points, not much inclined to explain things, let alone apologize. He seems a lot like 16-year-olds I have known, including me circa 1970.
He's there, in the book, magically recreated in the very act of understanding that he is irretrievably gone.
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