Yiyun Li, the author of “The Book of Goose,” “Wednesday’s Child,” and “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” reflects on the suicide of her younger son, six years after the suicide of her ...

The story, which opens in a small Scottish town in the nineteen-eighties, follows two young friends, James and Tully, and is based on O’Hagan’s real-life friendship with a man named Keith Martin.