Thoughts on A Little Life
Tragic, life-changing pageturner.
Cover of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Part of me fears that I will attempt and fail to put words to a story that, even though it was written masterfully using them, is above any words I can conjure up. But I will try anyway.
— Warning: This article contains spoilers. —
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a heartbreaking novel about friendships, family, love, trauma, and life outside the normal status quo that change my life after I read it. While the story is told in the third person and does not explicitly follow one main character the whole time through, we come to learn the most about Jude, a man who has lived through unspeakable traumas and learns to love and accept love. Or maybe, it’s not that we learn the most about him, but out of all the characters in the book, he had the most stories to uncover.
What a terrible story. Beautifully written, masterfully thought out, and terrible only in the sense that Jude faced such terrible treatment. It saddens me to get reminded that bad people, strangers, can do such irreparable harm to children and scar them for life.
How does one live on after reading this book? Why does anyone choose to keep living, after suffering scarring traumas? Hope seems like the closest answer, yet there’s something more to it that I cannot name.
Willem’s character interests me because his devotion to Jude parallels his past devotion to Hemming, his younger brother. Would he be as accommodating to Jude if he hadn’t had to take care of his brother? I like to think so, because we see Willem get praised from a young age by teachers saying he is so friendly and kind. He is simple, compassionate, handsome, perfect for Jude.
And then he gets killed off.
I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t see it coming. As I read through the first few pages of VI. Dear Comrade, I kept cursing the author not only for pushing the plot in this necessary direction, but also for describing this development through Jude’s point of view. The one person who he felt wholly safe with, who gave him solace from the nightmares of his life, who he could hug without feeling repulsed, is snatched from him by the stupidity of a drunk truck driver. How heartbreaking is that?
When I finished the book one Saturday morning, after having braced myself for a terrible ending, I found myself subdued. The ending made sense in an ironic cynical way. Of course all the good people die. Of course the only one out of the four left is the pathetic JB. Of course Jude kills himself—and is that a tragedy? I found myself thinking that maybe all the beloved characters—Jude, Andy, Richard—died young because they were given relief from the punishment of life.
But then again, maybe that statement only applied to Jude (were Andy and Richard’s lives so terrible that they wanted to die? I don’t think so), meaning that the others were let go simply due to chance. Or, and this is just speculation, Jude’s friends also died one by one after his own death because they were no longer needed, no longer bound to their relationship with the ones left—Harold, JB—by Jude. Jude was the glue that brought all these people together, working toward the same cause: to save their beloved friend. Now that that friend was gone, they could rest easy, in a sense.
That Saturday morning, though, I didn’t think all this yet. I just didn’t want to finish the novel, because as depressing as the stories were, I wanted more. I wanted to keep reading about Jude and Willem laughing at their friends’ reactions to their relationship status; Andy’s angry and proud letter after Jude tells him that Harold is adopting him; Malcolm going over his designs of Jude’s apartment, trying to convince him to keep the handlebars for the toilet; Harold’s letter responding to the letter Jude wrote apologizing for breaking Jacob’s mug; young Willem and JB and Malcolm surrounding Jude as they walk in case he slips on the icy sidewalk; Willem rescuing Jude from a panic attack, whispering words that bring him back to life. So I flipped through the book backward for the next two hours, reliving the pleasant memories the characters experienced, until I ended up back at Lispenard Street.
I didn’t know how to feel about JB throughout the book. Yes, I disliked him because of his inflated ego borne out of insecurity. Yes, even though most of his artistic success is based on paintings of his friends’ lives, not his, he takes all the credit. Yes, he made fun of Jude’s posture when he was high, confirming Jude’s fears and throwing a wrench in his friendship with Jude and Willem. Yes, he stupidly kissed Jude at his art showcase after Willem’s death, exemplifying his greed and lack of consideration for anyone other than himself. Yet I can’t say I hate him. A part of me thinks, that’s the way he is. He can’t be any other way, because he’s JB. There’s no taking back the drugs, the mistakes, the ego fed from birth, the insecurities that led him down that path. All I can feel is sorry for him.
One of my uni friends who frequents social media (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) noticed the novel on my desk and asked, for some reason incredulously, “You’re reading A Little Life??” I nodded, thinking about how my sister recommended it, and listened as my friend claimed that the novel is “trauma-porn” and that they would never read it. Their opinions struck me as strong for someone who hadn’t even cracked open the novel. But I didn’t want to start a debate (at that time, I had only started reading the novel, so I didn’t know much about the storyline yet), so I stayed quiet and the conversation drifted to another topic.
That same night, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend’s strong reaction to the book. So I asked them, right before we fell asleep, what makes a story count as “selling trauma?” (That’s how I interpreted the phrase “trauma-porn”: a form of media that takes trauma and glamorizes it to earn money from its sales.) They started rambling about how they hadn’t read the novel, and got their information from YouTube video analyses, so I should take their words with a grain of salt, and that some people didn’t like the book because it was too triggering for them, and other people might have benefitted from reading the book, and that maybe the book doesn’t count as “selling trauma” per se but isn’t for everyone.
So they didn’t really answer my question, just gave a bunch of unrelated information to have something to say, but who can blame them? No one wants to admit they might be wrong. It’s hard. That’s the way they are, I reminded myself. People are the way they are, and there’s not much you can do about it except accept it. Instead of trusting a random (and probably eloquently formatted) opinion on the Internet, I wanted to read the book and form my own, but that doesn’t mean I have to change my friend’s opinion. They can believe what they want to believe, and it doesn’t affect me.
Just because the book centers around trauma’s impact on a person, yet is written in a way that keeps you turning the pages, doesn’t mean it is a bad book. It’s simply a story about a man who experienced devastating childhood trauma. If that is triggering, don’t read it. But don’t criticize a novel for showing the world the ugly sides of many people’s realities.
I found the knowledge I gained about the world’s horrors more valuable than my naiveté.
So I accepted that my friend and I don’t agree. I accepted that yes, Yanagihara relates landscapes to Jude’s scarred flesh, but that’s not “glamorizing trauma,” but simply trying to describe Jude as a beautiful person, inside and out, despite everything he went through. I accepted that while others thought the book shouldn’t go into such depths of description about traumatizing events, I found the knowledge I gained about the world’s horrors more valuable than my naiveté; I saw the book as more of a reflection of life than a mere fictional tale. I accepted that I truly enjoyed the book and loved every heartfelt interaction.