A review by silly_dragon
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

3.0

This is difficult to rate. When I was reading it, aspects of the mc's internal narrative were so incredibly meaningful to me for how it articulated living your adult life with deep childhood trauma that is just a core part of you and will never not be. With more distance from the text, I kinda hate it. Most of the characters in this book exist to live, but the disabled poc trauma survivor mc exists to die. That's baked into the plot in a way that reads as a bit eugenecist in how it values different lives. Also, there's a whole thing that is presented as past trauma being part of a present relationship but is actually just sexual assault (and kinda acephobic) between two characters that we're supposed to love and root for. The parts of the book relating to physical disability very much appear to be written by an able bodied person. Also, I don't want to police the way a woman of color writes about race but it is weird for an Asian American woman to write so much about what it means to be a black man in america.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Torture, Violence, Trafficking, Grief, Medical trauma, Suicide attempt, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Ableism, Medical content, Kidnapping, and Acephobia/Arophobia

re acephobia and partner assault: in the relationship between two main characters, one character is unable to enjoy sex but does it anyway because they sort of think they have to, while the other knows the first person doesn’t want to have sex but pretends not to know out of a sense that not having sex in their relationship wouls be something horrible. The text does not challenge this beliefe. Re eugenics vibes: the main character, a queer poc disabled trauma survivor, dealing with chronic pain and ptsd, who is sexually assaulted many times in this book, exists to die. This death is in service of the story that goes on to center this character's (white, non disabled) fiance. It's not a good look