![]() ![]() ![]() (The book was based on the real-life story of Daniel Gajdusek, disgraced Nobel prize winner and a distant friend of Yanagihara’s family.) It took her a dozen years to write. The first, T he People in the Trees, is unreliably narrated by a distinguished anthropologist who, late in his career, has been accused by one of the young male Pacific Island subjects he has “adopted” of cruelty and abuse. It is probably one I will never have again, and one I never want again.”Ī Little Life is Yanagihara’s second novel. That process, which I experienced, is absorbing and dangerous. ![]() In the first part of the book, JB is talking about painting and about how it becomes more real than life itself. Though it was an exhilarating experience it was also an alienating one. I was writing every single night and all weekend and it is not something I necessarily recommend. “I’d had the characters in my head for a long time. “I knew when I started it would be about 1,000 manuscript pages,” Yanagihara says, with the true novelist’s sense of fate. ![]() Before we got on to the subject of pathology and drawing we started by talking about the ways in which A Little Life – which begins as a conventional tale of four young men, friends from college, partying and gossiping and trying to make their way in New York, before it evolves into something much darker – had taken over her existence these past three years. That she wrote the 375,000 words of her book in something of a “fevered” state every night for 18 months on coming home from work and that she had fought with her editor to keep much of the horror of Jude’s story intact, as he had argued to leave some things unsaid, to give the reader a break.Ī day after finishing A Little Life, and still in its claustrophobic world, I met Yanagihara at the Savoy, where she was staying for a weekend in London (her day job for the past several years has been as editor-at-large of Condé Nast’s Traveller magazine she is now an editor at the New York Times style magazine T). 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. ![]()
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