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A review by kamharellano
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
challenging
dark
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Whoo boy, that was a rough one.
Trigger warnings: ableism, child abuse, child molestation, pedophilia, rape, drug abuse, domestic violence, eating disorder, emotional abuse, gaslighting, grooming, self-harm, sexual assault, suicide ideation, suicide.
Please take these trigger warnings to heart. Hardly anyone that hypes this book on Tiktok and Instagram ever talks about how truly traumatic the events in this book are and I absolutely hate the thought of someone going in unprepared.
This is a spoilery review because I don’t think I can fully talk about how I feel without going into some details of the book.
Proceed at your own risk.
Let me get started by saying that at the end of it all, there were elements to A Little Life that I liked. As someone who also made lifelong friends in school, I really appreciated the way this book portrayed the beginnings of Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm’s friendships, how together navigated things like adulthood, trauma, fame, substance abuse, relationships, identity, sexuality, and just the overall human experience. It involves a little less navel-gazing than your typical literary fiction book (I am not a litfic girlie and I’m very picky with those that I do read, haha) so I did end up vibing with it. Hanya Yanagihara also has a very easy writing style that I found quite accessible. Despite this book’s sheer size (it has nearly a whopping 800 pages), I found myself breezing through.
However, almost everything else didn’t work for me.
A day ago, I posted a story on my Instagram asking anyone who’d read A Little Life to slide into my DMs because I had plenty of Thoughts™ and wanted to pick the brain of someone who’d already finished the book. A handful of friends and my sister answered the call, and everyone—whether or not they liked the book—pretty much agreed with my opinion. Which was that everything that happened to Jude, from the physical abuse at the hands of the monastery he grew up in, to being groomed, prostituted, and raped by Brother Luke, to being abused and raped by the counselors into whose care he was put, to exchanging sexual favors for transportation as a teenager, to being assaulted and getting his legs run over with a car by Dr. Traylor, feels deliberately exaggerated in a fetishistic torture porn kind of way. Everything, everything, that happens to Jude, seems to serve no other purpose than as some kind of shock factor.
I understand that all sorts of narratives need to be portrayed, including sad and traumatic ones. I’m not saying at all that there’s no room for this kind of fiction. I would even say that such a reading and writing experience can be cathartic or used as a processing tool for the disabled, the neurodivergent, and those who’ve experienced trauma.
But it bothered me a lot that the ultimate point of A Little Life seems to be driving home the point of Jude’s hopelessness and worthlessness, that its goal is to inform the reader that Jude simply doesn’t deserve to be happy. It bothered me even more when I looked up Hanya Yanagihara and discovered not only is she not disabled, she’s outright stated that what she sought to create with Jude is a character who is “too damaged to ever truly be repaired” with “a single inevitable ending for him”.
What a harmful message to send out for an author for whom this reality will only ever be a thought experiment, a fun little brain exercise that won her a whole bunch of awards.
After going through great pains to show us what Jude’s done to build a life he can be proud of, still, the book ends with him committing suicide. What particularly struck me was the description of Jude’s funeral—his memorial service is surrounded by old friends from college, friends from the law firm where he’s the youngest partner ever and a brilliant, well-known litigator, the professor and his wife who’ve grown close to him and adopted him as their son, people from a non-profit he volunteers at, and so, so, so much more. Even with all that enrichment in his life, even with everyone who loves Jude, Hanya Yanagihara still believes that this is a man who is “too damaged” and whose only logical ending is suicide.
Like I said, it’s not that I think these narratives shouldn’t exist. It’s just that, when these themes of trauma and tragedy experienced by a gay disabled man are explored by a straight abled woman, it just feels straight-up mean.
Trigger warnings: ableism, child abuse, child molestation, pedophilia, rape, drug abuse, domestic violence, eating disorder, emotional abuse, gaslighting, grooming, self-harm, sexual assault, suicide ideation, suicide.
Please take these trigger warnings to heart. Hardly anyone that hypes this book on Tiktok and Instagram ever talks about how truly traumatic the events in this book are and I absolutely hate the thought of someone going in unprepared.
This is a spoilery review because I don’t think I can fully talk about how I feel without going into some details of the book.
Proceed at your own risk.
Let me get started by saying that at the end of it all, there were elements to A Little Life that I liked. As someone who also made lifelong friends in school, I really appreciated the way this book portrayed the beginnings of Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm’s friendships, how together navigated things like adulthood, trauma, fame, substance abuse, relationships, identity, sexuality, and just the overall human experience. It involves a little less navel-gazing than your typical literary fiction book (I am not a litfic girlie and I’m very picky with those that I do read, haha) so I did end up vibing with it. Hanya Yanagihara also has a very easy writing style that I found quite accessible. Despite this book’s sheer size (it has nearly a whopping 800 pages), I found myself breezing through.
However, almost everything else didn’t work for me.
A day ago, I posted a story on my Instagram asking anyone who’d read A Little Life to slide into my DMs because I had plenty of Thoughts™ and wanted to pick the brain of someone who’d already finished the book. A handful of friends and my sister answered the call, and everyone—whether or not they liked the book—pretty much agreed with my opinion. Which was that everything that happened to Jude, from the physical abuse at the hands of the monastery he grew up in, to being groomed, prostituted, and raped by Brother Luke, to being abused and raped by the counselors into whose care he was put, to exchanging sexual favors for transportation as a teenager, to being assaulted and getting his legs run over with a car by Dr. Traylor, feels deliberately exaggerated in a fetishistic torture porn kind of way. Everything, everything, that happens to Jude, seems to serve no other purpose than as some kind of shock factor.
I understand that all sorts of narratives need to be portrayed, including sad and traumatic ones. I’m not saying at all that there’s no room for this kind of fiction. I would even say that such a reading and writing experience can be cathartic or used as a processing tool for the disabled, the neurodivergent, and those who’ve experienced trauma.
But it bothered me a lot that the ultimate point of A Little Life seems to be driving home the point of Jude’s hopelessness and worthlessness, that its goal is to inform the reader that Jude simply doesn’t deserve to be happy. It bothered me even more when I looked up Hanya Yanagihara and discovered not only is she not disabled, she’s outright stated that what she sought to create with Jude is a character who is “too damaged to ever truly be repaired” with “a single inevitable ending for him”.
What a harmful message to send out for an author for whom this reality will only ever be a thought experiment, a fun little brain exercise that won her a whole bunch of awards.
After going through great pains to show us what Jude’s done to build a life he can be proud of, still, the book ends with him committing suicide. What particularly struck me was the description of Jude’s funeral—his memorial service is surrounded by old friends from college, friends from the law firm where he’s the youngest partner ever and a brilliant, well-known litigator, the professor and his wife who’ve grown close to him and adopted him as their son, people from a non-profit he volunteers at, and so, so, so much more. Even with all that enrichment in his life, even with everyone who loves Jude, Hanya Yanagihara still believes that this is a man who is “too damaged” and whose only logical ending is suicide.
Like I said, it’s not that I think these narratives shouldn’t exist. It’s just that, when these themes of trauma and tragedy experienced by a gay disabled man are explored by a straight abled woman, it just feels straight-up mean.