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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He hosts the Interstellar Song Contest, which promises top tunes in the Tardis. Then it’s over to Switzerland for the big bonanza! Here’s what to watch this evening

7.10pm, BBC One

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OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Her Tension world tour reaches the UK, and it’s the work of a relaxed but inherently flamboyant singer with a bold new vision for her back catalogue

The lights go down in Glasgow, and Kylie Minogue ascends from underneath the stage like a pop deity: head-to-toe in electric blue PVC, sitting in the centre of a giant neon diamond. After acclaimed runs in Australia and the US, she’s kicking off the UK leg of her Tension tour, celebrating an era that started two years ago with lead single Padam Padam – a phenomenon everywhere from gay clubs to TikTok – and continued with her equally hook-filled albums Tension and Tension II.

In contrast to some recent over-complicated arena tour concepts from the likes of Katy Perry, the Tension show is admirably straightforward after Kylie’s big entrance, allowing her to remain the focus at all times. She races through hits – some condensed into medleys – at an astonishing pace; from 1991’s What Do I Have To Do, to Good As Gone from Tension II. For Better the Devil You Know, she changes into a red sequin jumpsuit and matching mic, leading a troupe of highlighter-coloured dancers in front of a minimalist, impressionistic backdrop. There’s something of the Pet Shop Boys’ art-pop flair in the show’s considered design choices, and in Kylie’s inherent – rather than costume-driven – flamboyance.

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Moore plays a creepy socialite obsessed with raptors; Meghann Fahy plays a hot mess who thinks there may be a murder cover-up … or several. This is snappy satirical TV that goes down easy – and it’s only five episodes long. Woohoo!

I have a theory that TV shows nowadays are all tonal variations on either The White Lotus , Boiling Point or possibly Yellowstone , but honestly I haven’t seen the latter. You might wish I had supporting evidence, but isn’t that what a theory is?

Anyway, this week’s pick is definitely in the White Lotus mould. Sirens (Netflix, from Thursday 22 May) unfolds over Labor Day weekend in the Lloyd Neck peninsula of upstate New York, where a wealthy group of guests descend on a beachside estate for a charity gala. The raptor conservation organisation (think falcons, not velociraptors) is run by socialite Michaela Kell, a wellness-y guru who expects obedience from everyone around her. But preparations are interrupted by Devon, a chaotic falafel waitress who has come to save her sister Simone, Michaela’s assistant. Devon comes to believe Simone has been brainwashed, and that they’re mixed up in a murder, or several. It’s a long weekend.

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I was too afraid to confess my feelings and be rejected, until hearing Jarvis Cocker’s words gave me a moment of clarity

The first time Gordon and I kissed I thought we’d made a terrible mistake. It was 1995, we were both 20 years old, and we were drinking at our university bar in Leicester. We had formed a friendship over the previous three years, but I had never considered Gordon in a romantic light. He was a goth at the time, which I thought was very cool, and he had this fruity, posh voice – whereas I was a timid girl from south London with a terrible perm. I remember Gordon leaning in to give me this very innocent, tentative kiss, but it caught me off guard. I felt excited but also confused. For one thing, I’d only ever known Gordon to kiss his fellow goths.

I avoided Gordon for weeks after that, which was difficult, considering we were on the same course. We bumped into each other almost every day in lectures but I made things awkward. Conversations between us didn’t flow in the same way. I’m an overthinker, whereas Gordon is much more relaxed. I think he would have been happy to keep kissing me in a casual sort of way and see where things led, but I was frightened of ruining our friendship. I was so shy at that time, and didn’t connect with people as easily as Gordon did. I had very deep feelings for him, but I wasn’t able to acknowledge them. Gordon was the closest person to me and I was terrified of losing him by having a fling.

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Death’s back to settle more accounts and Amanda Seyfried’s a cop on the hunt for a killer – it’s your cultural primer for the next seven days, whether you’re taking your seat or resting your feet ...

Final Destination: Bloodlines
Out now
Functioning like a sort of extreme version of You’ve Been Framed, this is the premier horror franchise dedicated to giving you intrusive thoughts about horrible accidents. Of course, they aren’t actually accidents, but Death himself, stalking those snatched from his grasp via handy premonitions. Not for the faint of stomach.

E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea
Out now
You’ve probably heard of Le Corbusier, but have you heard of the architect he was obsessed with, and her greatest creation? The titular Eileen and the modernist villa she built in the 1920s are the subject of this poetic docudrama.

Hallow Road
Out now
Directed by Babak Anvari (Under the Shadow), and starring Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, this chiller is set almost entirely in the car of two parents racing to help their daughter, who has just phoned to tell them she’s accidentally run down a pedestrian.

Black Debutantes
BFI Southbank, London, to 31 May
This ongoing season is dedicated to early films made by Black female directors, many of whom were subsequently unable to build the careers that should have followed. In addition to the films, the season features events and panels, including Exhibiting Black Cinema on 22 May. Catherine Bray

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Benito Skinner goes to college in Overcompensating and The Boss is at his Trump-lambasting best. Here’s the pick of this week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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Imogen Poots takes the lead in Stewart’s choppy but compelling adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of abuse and sexual uncertainty

Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, adapted by her from the 2011 abuse memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, is running a very high temperature, though never exactly collapsing into outright feverishness or torpor. It’s a poetry-slam of pain and autobiographical outrage, recounting a writer’s journey towards recovering the raw material of experience to be sifted and recycled into literary success.

The present day catastrophes of failed relationships, drink and drugs are counterpointed with Super-8 memories and epiphanies of childhood with extreme closeups on remembered details and wry, murmuring voiceovers. It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

Lidia herself, well played by Imogen Poots, is a young woman who was abused in her teenage years by her clenched and furious architect father (Michael Epp) – along with her sister (Thora Birch) who often sacrificed herself to their father’s loathsome attentions to divert him away from Lidia – and their mother went into depressive denial throughout.

Lidia throws herself into being a fanatically focused swim team champ which gets her a college scholarship that she messes up through booze and coke. The film shows how in the water she feels free; swimming laps against the clock gives her a purpose and an escape – a cancellation of identity.

But now Lidia has a terrible secret: it is not merely that she is an abuse survivor – she masturbates incessantly thinking about it, and utterly despises her weak-beta male boyfriend (Earl Cave) for being nice and gentle. (That, and being spanked by her swim coach, is also a complicating factor for her interest in BDSM.)

So when her artistic opportunity arrives, so does a toxic crisis of daddy issues. Her attempts at writing get her the chance to participate in an experimental collaborative novel being masterminded by the counterculture legend Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) whose interest in her appears unsettlingly like her father’s. Is history repeating itself? Is degradation the price you pay for success in writing – or swimming – or anything? Her own writerly evolution is shown by the books she reads herself – Vita Sackville-West’s biography of Joan of Arc as a kid, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a student, and then, as a young writer, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.

These personal stories and their movie versions have been undermined recently by notorious fake memoirist JT LeRoy – whose alter ego Savannah Knoop was actually played by Kristen Stewart in a screen version of her troubled life.

But for all that, and some callow indie indulgences, this is an earnest and heartfelt piece of work, and Stewart has guided strong, intelligent performances.

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Cannes film festival
The U2 singer’s ‘quarter-man’ solo stage show sees him reflect likably on his anguished family past and have a decent go at being an ordinary Joe

The stadium-conquering rock superstar Bono finds a smaller arena than usual for this more intimate and much acclaimed “quarter-man” show, performed solo without his U2 bandmates Adam Clayton, David “The Edge” Evans and Larry Mullen Jr and filmed live on stage at New York’s Beacon theatre in 2023 by Andrew Dominik. It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz.

Bono delivers anecdotes from his autobiography Surrender, starting with his recent heart scare and going back to his Dublin childhood, his musical breakthrough to global fame, his post-Live Aid charity work on poverty and famine relief (though no discourse on the question of whether Live Aid was a good thing), and his religious faith which evidently morphed from a radical Christianity in his teen years to a more wide-embracing spirituality; it is all interspersed with “unplugged” versions of U2 standards accompanied by harp and cello.

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