I might be in the minority here, but I went into ‘A Little Life’ expecting to come out sobbing, or just hugging the book and crying cause I’ve never ugly cried or sobbed at books, mostly happy tears, so seeing all these booktoks of everyone actually sobbing, I was prepared.
There was a moment in the middle where I was physically scared to turn the page cause I wanted it to stop, but I just went ahead with it.
It got worse, then better and worse and better, and just like life, had its ups and downs. And despite it all, it was a life lived. I mean when I closed the book I genuinely smiled. Like I looked into a life of a loved one.
There is talk that the trauma is not possible in real life and whatnot, but I didn’t like it for the content, I liked it for the essence of the book, the characters, the friendships and love, the impact a childhood trauma can have for the rest of the life, overcoming it, living with it.
I don’t think it’s overhyped, just reached the wrong audience mostly.
If I read this as a teenager I’d take it the wrong way, the wrong lessons, but as a 30 year old, I see it differently.
EDIT: I’m LOVING the comments, it’s so great to hear all your thoughts and opinions. Cause all my life I’ve been surrounded by people who either don’t read or read but don’t discuss, argue etc, this comments thread is the conversation of my dreams. 🙈
by 3amdreamer_1004
25 Comments
It’s just off-putting that so many of Yanagihara’s books are about different ways gay men can be tortured. One is unremarkable, but three is unseemly.
Everybody debates the trauma porn and whether it was too much but I just hated the author’s writing style. The two dimensional characters and the constant use of parentheses were driving me insane. I quit around the 100 page mark before all the traumatic stuff got going.
I thought the book was ok. The writing was really clunky in some places which bothered me. I did love Harold’s character and the general theme of chosen families. However, I can’t get behind novels that manipulate the reader as intensely as this book does. I get why folks like it and though I take issue with how some of the subject matter is presented, I have heard that it has helped some survivors despite its deeply triggering content.
I will also never get over how smug Yanigihara was in interviews when asked about research for this novel. She did sooooo much research about the various careers of the characters but proudly asserts that she did none on sexual abuse or any of the traumatic subject matter. I find that incredibly irresponsible and gross. She just rubs me the wrong way I’m afraid.
Yeah I don’t get this one – it was such a slog and I forced myself through it because people love it so much that I convinced myself it must get better. I didn’t shed any tears, because the whole point of the book seemed to be to just cram in as much traumatic content to shock the reader. It was just plot points rather than part of any character development, so I actually just didn’t really care. I found myself rolling my eyes thinking yes….of course that would happen. It’s like she had a big list of ‘really awful things I want to happen’ and just threw them in weather it was necessary or made sense.
A book for me that had some similarities (about a group of friends, sad themes) and was much more successful was ‘The Great Believers’ by Rebecca Makkai.
I just loved it. But I totally understand it is not for everyone, and I am very careful about who I recommend it to. For me, it was a meditation on suffering— almost an aestheticization of suffering. I can see how that offends or triggers some people. We don’t all need the same thing. As someone who suffered (nowhere near as much as Jude) it was cathartic to just sit with it a little. To feel recognized.
I’ve never thrown a book in the trash before until I read A Little Life.
Also, I have some big issues with contemporary, straight authors contributing to the doomed ever after narrative of LGBTQ stories. We’ve had enough already.
It’s interesting — I just finished Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which is a quite different book in many ways, but includes similar themes about queerness and development under extreme suffering. It won the Booker prize. I didn’t love it, and some of the reasons I felt neutrally about it made me appreciate a little bit more what Yanagihara does in A Little Life. She does much more to play with melodrama, and her kind of dense descriptive language aestheticizes the suffering in a way that might be immoral, but it’s pretty engaging to read.
I DNF’d this one at about 20% on my kindle (at 700+ pages that’s a lot). I really tried to like it but it just seemed like this one trick pony with all the trauma porn. I keep seeing young women on the subway reading this book and it makes me wonder what it is they’re enjoying because I couldn’t.
I hated it. It started off decent but spiraled out of control into trauma porn. There was no balance whatsoever- he’s either being horribly abused or busy being extremely successful (same with all the other characters) and loved beyond reason.
So many nonsensical plot points as well. There are a lot of little details that add to the unbelievableness of this book. It’s like the author is trying to be idealistic but it comes off as campy, cliched, and try hard. She doesn’t give the reader enough credit to see through these details.
The big one- what are the circumstances that brought Jude to the first monastery? I think he’s the only orphan there? How is he in that place with no child protective services oversight. Seriously how did he end up there and what system let him stay there?
Also the way she wrote the book and the use of pronouns (not to identify gender but to identify characters) was frustrating and made the book unnecessary difficult to read.
Not into reading 800-page books written solely for a woman to torture fictional gay men.
I liked it at first but the further I got into the story, the more disengaged I felt. It felt gratuitous to me, like the author was trying so hard to shock me with one horrible thing after another happening to Jude. If every few chapters you start rolling your eyes and going “here we go again” at something that’s meant to be deeply traumatic for your characters… maybe the author has taken it too far to be believable. It’s incredibly heavy handed.
I didn’t care for it. I just idk I didn’t feel the pull or the beauty I think I was supposed to
I loathe this book and wish I could have gotten out of it what others did. I read this in 2018 before it really blew up, but I’m shocked it got the following it did. Idk, the article she did about it really left a sour taste in my mouth.
I thought it was a titanic piece of shit.
This book causes quite a divide among readers I know. Personally, and unfortunately, I related to the atrocities that were committed against Jude. So, it was an impactful book for me then.
However, I truly cannot agree with Yanagihara’s take on therapy. Plus, her interview afterwards didn’t leave the best of impressions on me.
Not a fan. It’s just trauma porn. Yes, the author is capable of eliciting emotion in the reader, but that emotion is just pain, and sadness. The narrative is shitty, and unrealistic, and is literally just torture
The writing is extremely clunky, it’s 800+ pages of trauma porn, the author herself is just not a great person and does no research about her books other than to fetishize gay men and torture them as much as possible. I find her writing unremarkable and like its trying too hard to be elite, she spends the first half of the book connecting you to the main characters (who are all flawed) and then puts them through the worst thing imaginable to illicit a response from her readers, and it works for some people I guess! But for me it just really made me hate the book, her obsession with abusing gay men is concerning and I think another reviewer said it best “the first time Jude cuts himself you feel bad, the 600th time you’re hoping he hits a vein”. It’s lazy writing and it’s disturbing.
I would never suggest this book to anyone and I felt like I wasted a day of reading on it, I finished it in January and I’m still mad about it 6 months later (if you couldn’t tell). I have told multiple of my friends to not read it and have dissuaded them from buying it because I dislike it so much. I’m an ex seventh day adventist and I’d rather read the bible cover to cover 5 times before ever reading this book again.
I never miss out on an opportunity to express my contempt for this book.
I was on board for the first 100 pages or so, when it looked like a four-way story of friends entering adulthood in NY, and I was maybe too slow to realise it was actually a poorly-written (purple prose and melodramatic style, stereotypes and ignorance galore), supremely uninteresting trauma porn. The last refuge of a bad writer are characters, plenty of mediocre books (or films, or shows) are kept afloat by characters you still somehow care for, but here none was believable and all were flat as cardboard. It was laughably bad.
I’m curious who you thought “overcame” trauma? I felt like the point of the book was that not all trauma can be healed from. I only like exactly two things about the book and hated everything else: 1. Not all endings are happy. Sometimes people can’t get over their trauma, and 2. The fact that it follows the characters for an extremely long time period.
Ultimately the book felt like a thinly-velied literary version of Hostile/Saw/A Serbian Film (Aka torture porn), and had such unrealistic character relationships that it felt like I was watching a disturbed child play house with four Ken Dolls in a way that would have me as a parent calling a psychologist to get them checked out.
Book is just torture porn.
I enjoyed this book. I read somewhere that Yanagihara set out to paint a portrait of trauma >!as something you never resolve or heal – that it is either something you learn to live with….or you don’t.!< To that end, I think she was very successful. And my personal opinion is that dismissing it as “tragedy porn” does a strong disservice to one’s experience. While I think there are people that experience comparable depths of tragedy, I didn’t read it as something that was meant to be hyper-realistic. Rather, I think there is an argument which can be made that by layering such an improbable amount of grotesque traumas, it more effectively and viscerally communicates to the reader what some unfortunate soul who has had a more “realistic” amount of traumas might they themselves feel. And that knee-jerk sense of oppressive apathy towards continuing and numbness or failing investment in the lives of the character(s) is kind of meta. I kind of wish more people would sit with that. Not saying you need to flip your opinion but I think it is good reflection fodder all the same. It is not a perfect comparison but it feels a little to me like saying Rorschach Tests and not worth looking at because they are just meaningless ink blobs by design instead of a tool to help you understand your mind.
One specific takeaway for me is that I have known a fair many people who engaged in cutting when they were younger and, despite trying to understand and be supportive much as Willem did, it never made as much sense to me until this book. How it captures the tragic paradox of conceding a harmful act to avert a more disastrous one (and it certainly did not glorify the act). I am sure there have been books that I dismissed for the sense that they were too heavy-handed or trying to be emotionally manipulative, but I really did not get that sense with A Little Life. Of course, that is just my two cents and ultimately, to each their own.
Tangential but in a recent-ish radio interview, Chuck Palahniuk had said that one of the reasons behind his writing Fight Club was because there was an absence of literature where men confide and work through their problems with other men. How, so often in coming of age stories, female protagonists experience maturation through friendship while male protagonists mature through romantic or sexual relationships. I think A Little Life is a small but significant push against that grain in its representation of men being emotionally vulnerable with each other.
I loved the book too. I cried and smiled. I’m always surprised at the overly negative response. I think it’s really a beautiful book about life and death and suffering. I think the characters are very well written. I think it ultimately gives me hope that through all the suffering there are rays of light.
Garbage book from a garbage author with garbage views about mental health.
Completely unrealistic.
An orthopedic surgeon is going to risk his license to treat this severely mentally ill patient on the sly just because he likes him that much?
A person is abandoned, abused, and molested continually from birth to high school graduation, but is also super successful getting into Harvard and MIT while doing dual law and math degrees? Also he has the skills of a world class chef/baker for some reason.
A straight guy is suddenly gay just because he likes his bro that much?
Then let’s toss some more rape and loss on top of that. It was completely comical. It was so over the top you couldn’t believe it.
fantastic book. all the “gay misery porn!!!” comments are so reductive, and honestly bullshit. you’d never call something like Jude the Obscure “straight misery porn”, so why do it in this case? additionally, I’m jealous of anyone who can simply write this off as misery porn. I know people with similar trauma, and it felt very well handled to me. not everything needs a happy ending.
I loved that book. It was one of those books which I closed and held on my chest sometimes. My version of hugging the characters & the author.
I don’t come across this kind of books, which follows characters through their lives. Maybe I am doing it wrong. I missed them. I learned that some people hate it and call it I can’t remember now, pain porn or something. I didn’t get that. Yes there were hard scenes and suffering. But isn’t that life? I have had losses in my family, one of them an early death that devasted us all and decades on are still painful. Friends who passed away way too early. Friends with terrible sicknesses, pain. Natural disasters which hit my best friends. I have friends who were raped. I doubt there are many who lived unscathed lives.
At the core of A Little Life is the friendship. And that’s what connected with me.