I was going to get the book, A Little Life, after a lot of people recommended it to me. My favorite genre of books are dark fiction and non-fiction books that go into the psychological plagues trauma brings upon a persons mind. I read them too to examine how an author dissects a traumatic event or events and brings the characters into those situations and how the characters progress. What always shocks me is seeing how other people react to these books. I suffered severe childhood trauma in various different ways. So reading these books is sometimes comforting, sometimes I read them with the intent to relate to a character, in the thoughts of the character towards an event that others might not have thought one would even experience. But watching some peoples reactions to books like A Little Life, and becoming nauseous or being in disbelief, I find it shocking. What are the experiences of people who read books who did not read it with intent to relate to the character. Why did you pick the book up? Im interested to see the other side of the coin. Does the emotional experiences of the characters resonate with you? Do you see any parallels within your our own life and the characters?
by r0xksana
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People read books about fighting dragons but they’ve (probably) never fought a dragon in real life. Reading only to “relate” to the main character is a shallow undertaking, imo. There’s a lot more to reading than that.
As an aside, you don’t actually know what other people’s lives are like. People can have all sorts of trauma that they don’t tell you about, so you don’t really have any way of knowing who’s lead a “stable” life or not, not really.
That said, on A Little Life in particular a lot of the criticism is not that it’s about trauma but that it’s trauma porn – made more evident by the fact that the author seems to have some sort of fascination with torturing gay men in her various stories. So that’s a big part of people’s criticism of it. This article goes more in depth about it: https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html