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Jun 14, 2016 · In this smart and intense literary suspense novel, Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude.
- (167K)
- Kindle Edition
I'm Thinking of Ending Things is the 2016 debut novel of Canadian writer Iain Reid. It was first published in June 2016 in the United States by Simon & Schuster. The book has been described as a psychological thriller and horror fiction, [1] [2] and it is about a young woman who has many doubts about her relationship with her boyfriend. In ...
Mar 28, 2019 · I'm Thinking Of Ending Things. Paperback – 28 Mar. 2019. by Iain Reid (Author) 3.9 10,464 ratings. See all formats and editions. Jake and his girlfriend are on a drive to visit his parents at their remote farm. After dinner at the family home, things begin to get worryingly strange.
- (10.5K)
- Iain Reid
“Reid’s gradually building spookiness and plainspoken intellectualism make I’m Thinking of Ending Things a smart and unexpectedly fun book.” – New York Journal of Books “This is the boldest and most original literary thriller to appear in some time.”
- Paperback
- March 21, 2017
- The Janitor (Guy Boyd)—And The Twist
- The Girlfriend
- The Phone Calls
- Jake
- Jake’s Parents
- The Musical Sequences
- Tulsey Town
- All of Those References
- The Author
Both versions of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, in the broadest possible sense,are about an imaginary couple on an imaginary road trip dreamed up by an elderly high school janitor who is contemplating suicide. Imaginaryisn’t quite the right word, though, because Jake, the man on the road trip, is a younger version of the janitor himself, while the ...
Both novel and film are ostensibly narrated by Jake’s (imagined, hypothetical) girlfriend, and her voice dominates both stories from the beginning: Kaufman opens his film by having Jessie Buckley read the first chapter nearly verbatim in voice-over. In the movie, however, the girlfriend is slightly more hypothetical, perhaps to reflect the fact tha...
The book also offers more evidence than does the film that the janitor is gaming out this hypothetical road trip to help him decide whether to kill himself. In the movie, the girlfriend gets a series of mysterious phone calls from someone who is leaving her voice messages. In the book, the girlfriend notes that the calls are coming from her own num...
Jake is the janitor and the janitor is Jake, so see above to find out most of what’s changed about him. One other thing worth noting is that in the film, Jake has a harder time preventing the janitor’s life from bleeding into his story. It isn’t until the 11th chapter (out of 13) that the novel’s Jake starts telling his girlfriend about the life of...
Jake’s parents are the same people in the novel and the film, except the film’s janitor has less control over his narrative. In the book, Jake and his girlfriend have an unsettling meal at his parents’ house, but except for one moment when the girlfriend notes that the mother “looks older,” there’s no sense that his parents are unstuck in time. In ...
The novel is set in an unspecified rural location, but the film, shot in New York, is explicitly supposed to be set in Oklahoma. This change was presumably made to provide a natural reason for the janitor to be extremely familiar with the musical Oklahoma!, a text that infuses the whole film. The novel doesn’t mention musical theater at all, but Ka...
In the book, Jake and his girlfriend make a late-night stop at a Dairy Queen. “Tulsey Town,” the name of the ice-cream store in the movie, was an unofficial name for Tulsa in the 19thcentury. The vintage Tulsey Town advertisement the janitor hallucinates toward the end of the film and its jingle draw heavily from this Dairy Queen ad made for drive-...
Charlie Kaufman’s personal interests and insecurities don’t derail his adaptation of I’m Thinking of Ending Things as thoroughly as they did his adaptation of The Orchid Thief, but he’s still worked a lot of them in there, primarily because allusions to other works are one of the main ways he hints that Jake’s girlfriend is fictional. “Most people ...
The final difference between the book and movie is a pretty simple one: Ian Reid has never put forward the argument that the shittiest twist ending a film could possibly have is “it was all happening inside one man’s mind,” and Charlie Kaufman has: In Adaptation, Donald Kaufman’s screenplay is the emblem of everything Charlie Kaufman hates about Ho...
- Matthew Dessem
Aug 27, 2020 · After dinner at the family home, things begin to get worryingly strange. And when he leaves her stranded in a snowstorm at an abandoned high school later that night, what follows is a chilling exploration of psychological frailty and the limitations of reality.
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Aug 25, 2020 · From the Back Cover. Soon to be a Netflix original movie directed by Charlie Kaufman, this deeply scary and intensely unnerving novel follows a couple in the midst of a twisted unraveling of the darkest unease. You will be scared. But you won’t know why…. I’m thinking of ending things.
- Iain Reid
