A review by sleepyaquarius
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

challenging dark sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

The more I think about this book, the more I fucking hate it.

Technically, it’s great. The writing is in and of itself very good; the author is a very talented writer, the characters voices are distinct, and the prose is great. Hence the half star.

EVERYTHING ELSE IS AWFUL.

This book is the definition of torture and trauma porn. Not just any kind of torture/trauma porn, either; it’s a heterosexual woman throwing an almost comical amount of trauma and abuse at her queer male characters. Not only that, but JB and Malcolm (the only two black characters in the book) are thrown away at the drop of a hat to give Willem and Jude more time--as if over 800 pages isn't enough to give each character an equal amount of development and attention. But if that were the case, how could she possibly fit in all of the torture for Jude?

So, we have a book that continuously torments queer men and tosses aside black men for… what, exactly? Shock value? To make TikTok book reviewers cry on camera and boost sales?

I felt bad for Jude for about the first 2/3 of the book, but eventually I got so fucking tired of him. I also got tired of everyone in his life because they’re all enablers. Someone (SPECIFICALLY Andy, who is a fucking DOCTOR) should have had Jude’s ass institutionalized solely for the amount of self-harm he does. As someone who used to self-harm, the amount of fucking self-harm in this book is obscene. Jude puts every single Tumblr-era emo kid in the world combined to shame. A review done in Vulture by Andrea Long Chu says it all: “The first time [Jude] cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim.”

Yanagihara has said in interviews that she does not believe in therapy, and thinks that some people are beyond help and that’s what she wanted to write about: someone who is so broken mentally and physically that they are beyond fixing. It is pure ableism. She does not understand victims of assault or trafficking, disabled people, people with PTSD, or queer people, all of which are topics that should be handled with extreme grace (ESPECIALLY if the author is not part of those communities, which Yanagihara is not), and none of it was.

Trigger warning for literally anything you can think of. I do not recommend this book. 
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