A personal response to "A Little Life"

How nice, I thought, a chronicle of four friends in New York City. An artist, a lawyer, an architect, and an actor. It showed up when I searched for “gay literature” on the internet. This is what I knew, or thought I knew, when I opened Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. This would be an evenly paced, sentimental, 720-paged novel that I could predict, consume, and leave all in one piece. This is what Yanagihara wants you to believe after the first several dozen pages. This is how the novel is presented on Goodreads: “When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition”. Despite the length, I thought I was getting into some “light reading”.

It would take only a few more pages to realize that this had only been a pleasant introduction, and that the real story of the novel was unlike anything I had ever read. 

I am not a literary critic. At university, I study film theory and history. I am not critiquing Yanagihara’s writing style, examining the novel’s structure, or offering my two cents on the issue of the supposed trauma exploitation that naysayers of the book claim Yanagihara is guilty. I do not have the education for such a task. Instead, this is a personal report of my own emotional experience reading the book. 

I admit that I literally judged this book by its cover. “The Orgasmic Man” that graces the front of the book grabbed me. Is this extreme pleasure, or extreme pain? Is one a product of the other? Either way, it is an climax of emotion. This absolute apex of feeling is a perfect representation of the contents of the novel. When I asked for the book at a used bookstore (this was after I had finished my copy from the library but felt an insatiable need to purchase my own), the owner said, “Oh, you mean the one with the terrible cover?” I responded, “No, the cover is beautiful.”

I read this book in five days. I probably haven’t read anything this quick since the entire Hunger Games series when I was 13. Of course, I have no way of knowing if my marathoning through this book was the reason for its impact, but I think it is safe to assume that is was a contributing factor. The effect of this book was profound, too much for me to encapsulate with written language, but I will try my best. Yanagihara’s style is accessible. The language is clear, allowing the trauma it presents to hit one’s heart immediately, without room for confusion. Jude, the lawyer, has had a traumatic early life as terrible as a person could possibly imagine. In fact, it is even worse than that. In the week that I read this novel, the depth of this trauma began to appear as a physical weight on my body, and people around me noticed. I became irritable, unfriendly, I only spoke when spoken to. At the same time, I had a cold. While logic tells me that this is a coincidence, it felt as though the pain of this character was physically manifesting itself into deteriorating health. I became increasingly pessimistic. If Jude does not get better, why should I? I felt guilt, as if my privileged real life was a contributing factor to the torrential fictional one of Jude St. Francis. I also felt jealousy for the love that surrounds Jude. I have personally struggled with creating genuinely strong friendships, and yet Jude is obviously surrounded by people that love him, but he cannot see this. I was, and am, jealous of Yanagihara for having been able to create such a great work of art, as if her success has depleted any possibility of my own. Of course, this jealousy led to more feelings of guilt. While I have recovered from the initial shock since finishing the book, it has not left me, and I honestly do not think it ever will. I both want to scream about the power of this book from the rooftops, and keep it a secret for myself and myself only. Usually, after I have consumed a significant piece of pop culture that has spoken to me in some way, I am prone to share my new discovery on social media. Not this time. I am unable to speak about it with my family and friends, for fear that they will suffer the same pain as me, or worse, that it will be just another book for them that requires no sort of emotional recovery. Instead, I have begun adapting scenes from the novel into screenplays. I do not have any reason to believe that these will ever manifest into actual filmed scenes, but it has functioned as a sort of personalized therapy, as if having a hand in telling the story allows me to control the way it affects me. Perhaps the best example of the book’s grand impact on myself is my sudden, impulsive purchase of a ticket to a play. The play is an adaptation of the book in Amsterdam, a ten hour flight from my home, and the date in question is a year from now. My parents cannot understand how a play could possibly justify a trip around the world, but they have not read A Little Life. I read this book over my school’s reading week, but this week felt like a 53 year duration. As I return to the routine of my classes, I try to imagine the person that had sat in the exact same spot two weeks earlier. She is different, not in the way the world sees her, but in the way she sees the world. Reading A Little Life is one of the most important things I have ever done. Sixty years from now, when I look back at the moments that determined the pathway and outcome of my life, this week and this book will be on the shortlist.

If one is looking for a significant psychological change in their life, I recommend this book. I do not recommend this book if one has a history of self harm or has been a victim of sexual abuse.

“My life, he will think, my life. But he won’t be able to think beyond this, and he will keep repeating the words to himself—part chant, part curse, part reassurance—as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life.”