[5] In 2020, Netflix released a film adaptation of the book, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, and David Thewlis.
They met in a pub, during a college trivia night, and Jake gave her his phone number by writing it on a piece of paper and slipping it into her bag.
After doing so, he starts making out with her in the car in front of the school, but stops due to a flashback memory where he sees the janitor watching them from one of the windows.
Many of the chapters of the book are separated by conversations between two strangers who discuss a horrific incident that occurred at the school, which is implied to be a murder, but later is revealed to be a suicide.
He drew on his experiences growing up on a farm in remote Ontario, as well as travelling Canadian country roads, in total darkness.
[1][8] He added that he appreciates books that "put some of the onus onto me to decipher and complete the story.”[9] After Reid had finished the novel, he had trouble finding someone who would publish it.
[11] In a review in the Chicago Tribune, Lloyd Sachs described I'm Thinking of Ending Things as "the boldest and most original literary thriller to appear in some time".
Sachs recommended re-reading the book, saying that "[w]ith its deep enigmas" and the "dense psychological space [the characters are] traveling through", it "remains as full of dark surprises as your friendly neighborhood black hole".
[12] Hannah Pittard wrote in a review in The New York Times that she felt the novel's "bait-and-switch tactic"—interspacing the Jake-and-girlfriend narrative with a commentary between two strangers about an unspecified tragedy—too "gimmicky".
Pittard expressed her disappointment at the book's "big reveal" at the end, saying that it "hastily disposes of unexplained and unnecessary red herrings, and the revelation is, at once, too tidy and too convenient to be satisfying".
[13] Writing in The Australian, author Pip Smith said the novel "reads like a short story, with its elastic stretched to snapping point".
[14] Smith was critical of Reid's portrayal of Jake's girlfriend as having "inferior intelligence.” She acknowledged that by the end of the book, it becomes clear that the author was not trying to create "a believable female character, but a misanthropic male's fantasy of a female character.” However, until the twist, readers "have spent 200 pages with a narrator who is structurally obliged to sound unintelligent".
She concluded that re-reading the book gives the text new meaning but added that many people will only read it once, and will miss Reid's "provocations about predetermination and free will".