So I’ve been wanting to read this book and I’ve heard it’s really sad. A few people said to me however that it’s not realistic towards how mental issues/health are depicted in the book and that the book has a bleak tone throughout the book with nothing positive ever happening. Is this the case with the book?
Also please, please don’t spoil anything since I haven’t read it yet
by Feisty-Treacle3451
4 Comments
I think it’s important to note the author doesn’t believe in therapy and that shows in what happens in the book.
I think no one piece of media is going to perfectly depict something like mental illness because it varies so much in everyone and manifests itself in about a million different ways. What might be unrealistic to your friend might be someone else’s reality.
I can’t speak to the realism of its depictions of mental health struggles, as my experience with people in my own life doesn’t have enough overlap. But yes, the novel is bleak, sad, but that is sort of mitigated by how melodramatic it is.
I read an interview by the author where she said something about intentionally writing the book “ombré”, I.e. it starts out kind of light and then gets darker and darker and darker until the end is basically black. I haven’t read the book either, but trigger warning, it’s extremely and escalatingly depressing on purpose.
Article: https://www.vulture.com/2015/04/how-hanya-yanagihara-wrote-a-little-life.html
Quote: “One of the ways I’d always described the book (to my editor and to my agent) was as a piece of ombré cloth: something that began on one end as a bright, light bluish-white, and ended as something so dark it was nearly black.”