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Jun 14, 2016 · Iain Reid. Iain Reid is the author of two critically acclaimed, award-winning books of nonfiction. His debut novel, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, was an international bestseller, and was translated into more than a dozen languages. Oscar-winner Charlie Kaufman is writing and directing the film adaptation for Netflix. Foe is Reid's second novel.
- (167K)
- Kindle Edition
- 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
Jun 22, 2016 · That’s when things get frightening and intense. This is an intelligent novel that expounds on loneliness and solitude (though this is done in such a way that it is almost incidental). It is a philosophical treatise on how fine a line there is between genius and madness. How you never really know another person.
Sep 2, 2016 · I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS By Iain Reid 210 pp. Scout Press. $22.95. ... The Book Review Podcast: Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world.
- Hannah Pittard
Jun 14, 2016 · amazon. A road trip in a snowstorm takes a sinister turn for a man and his girlfriend, the novel’s unnamed narrator. Reid’s preternaturally creepy debut unfolds like a bad dream, the kind from which you desperately want to wake up yet also want to keep dreaming so you can see how everything fits together—or, rather, falls apart.
- Kirkus Reviews
Jun 13, 2016 · I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always. Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.” And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.
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I'm Thinking of Ending Things Iain Reid, 2016 Gallery/Scout Press 224 pp. ISBN-13: 9781501126925 Summary I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always. Jake once said, "Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action.
