Grief Conquers Language — Almost — In 'Where Reasons End'
Yiyun Li wrote her devastating, brilliant new novel after the suicide of her son — in it, the unnamed narrator confronts the same situation, holding an extended conversation with her own dead son.
When a loved one dies, so does part of our language. Conversations we've had with the dead start to fade and eventually get lost to memory; our idiolects change when part of our audience is gone. And words become insufficient and unreliable, inadequate to convey the love we had for the ones we've lost or the void created by their absence.
In Yiyun Li's new novel, , the narrator is forced to reckon with the limits of language after the suicide of her
