That some of the more indelible moments of her childhood were those spent in roadside motels, waiting for her mother to return with the shopping. In the two or three days and nights I spent reading A Little Life, compelled to follow the story of Jude, a brilliant New York lawyer, and the flashbacks to his profoundly disturbing childhood that lead him to vivid self-harm, it was hard to disagree with either of those judgments.Īnd in breaks from reading, I found myself Googling for insights into Yanagihara herself, intrigued by confessional snippets she had offered around the time of publication: that she had, variously, based the book on the unsettling atmosphere of a series of photographs and paintings that she had been collecting for 14 years prior to writing it. The sober New Yorker became uncharacteristically breathless in describing it as a book that could “drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life”. The reviewer in the Los Angeles Times felt herself unqualified to offer a judgment on the book at all beyond the fact that it was the only novel she had read as a grownup that simply “left sobbing”. The novel, which is both a dislocating meditation on the trauma of child sexual abuse, and a moving tribute to the possibilities and limitations of adult male friendship and love, was widely greeted as a book of landmark honesty – “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years” – on publication in America in the spring (though some critics found its graphic descriptions of sexual violence both voyeuristic and too much to bear). It is hard to imagine anyone reading the 734 pages of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, A Little Life, without being curious about the life of the writer who created it. But then the fact is,” she suggests, “our bodies don’t care about us at all.”

“But I love discovering how far a body will go to protect itself, at all costs. That is never an abstract process, though, I say to her.

Ett litet liv by Hanya Yanagihara