The Library Won’t Want Your Tearstained Copy Back: A Little Life Book Review
Lindsey Botkin | March 28, 2024
Trigger Warning: self-harm, suicide, addiction, graphic scenes and sexual assault
I absolutely devoured the pages of Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” with vigor, like it was my last meal. This book made me squeal with delight and had me mourning for the characters in Yanagihara’s story. Published in 2015, Yanagihara has beautifully illustrated difficult subject matter in an approach that will have you thinking about the characters both when you are reading and afterward. This novel begins with four rather ambitious college students from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. The book at a whopping 814 pages is definitely a little bit of a longer read, but is so worth it. Following the boys from their early teens in NYC trying to make a life for themselves we follow them to their mid-fifties and eventual — albeit tragic — deaths.
The novel revolves around Jude St. Francis, a man with a past nobody knows about, a brilliant mind and someone you wish you could pull out of the pages to comfort. Jude, whom the story does seem to follow, is not the only character in the book that we watch struggle. We watch Harold struggle with the premature death of his son. We watch JB leave an abusive relationship and struggle with addiction on the road to fame. We watch Malcolm and Andy build families over the years. While there is bad, there is of course good. We watch as Jude and Willem, both wildly successful men in their chosen fields, fall in love and live together for much of the book. As I have said before, while this book addresses a variety of emotionally taxing topics, the way that Jude and Willem care for each other is one of the things that make this story joyful amongst the difficult pages. Every word that Yanagihara wrote on the pages of this book acted as a brushstroke, painting a picture of success, failure, heartbreak, self-loathing, grief and so much more.
Whilst reading this I had people stop me to ask “Is it good” and “Have you cried yet?”. My personal favorite was “You are so brave for reading that in public.” Not because it is raunchy, but because its reputation for absolutely tearing people up precedes itself. This book truly is an attack on the emotions. However, I cannot say that I did not enjoy it. As an avid reader, I have read a lot of books that have made me laugh and cry, but I have also read plenty of books that made my eyes glaze over with boredom. When I picked this up I was in a severe reading rut, and to say that this book shook me out of that is an understatement. This book helped me remember why I like to read. The complexity and depth of not just the characters but the realistic situations that they are put in as well truly make this book a candidate for what may later be deemed a “classic.” Yanagihara did many things right in this book but one of the things that stood out to me the most was the way that no character was one-dimensional.
I feel that it would be a crime to not give a trigger warning for this book. There are rape scenes, talk of drug abuse and self-harm is an underlying theme of the book. I was wary of this book for a while because of these themes, but each of them contributes to the overall brilliance of the characters that Yanagihara has brought to life. Amongst all of the scenes that are hard to read, there is a beautiful story about love and about life.
While self-harm is a persistent theme in the book, with readers experiencing a graphic description around every 50 pages, one of the quieter and arguably more important themes is the narrative of finding the beauty of life that lives within the hard moments. We hear many of the character's inner monologues throughout the book, and this sentiment is one of the only things each one of them can agree on. “...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
Yanagihara’s intricately woven story struck me as beautiful in many ways, but one of the ones I wasn’t expecting was the amount of comfort and joy that this story brought me. I know that each time I read it I will take away something new. I wholeheartedly believe that every person, if able, needs to read this book. Yanagihara has managed to capture and illustrate the carefully woven strands that all of our lives are made of. You will cry. You will also laugh, squeal in delight and tense with fear and anticipation. If you do pick up this novel, know that part of Yanagihara’s brilliance is not giving the reader what they want most for the character — peace.
Yanagihara’s book serves as a reminder to all of us, that we should cherish the relationships that make even the most mundane moments enjoyable. “Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”