A Little Life
Two weeks ago, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life took over my life.
Over the course of these two weeks, these 800+ pages, I have felt all the feelings. I have cried on an alphabet’s worth of subway lines, texted friends shocked sentences and sad-face emojis, and curled up despairingly in bed, inconsolable over something I just read.
And yet, I’ve also been unable to put A Little Life down. I considered taking a sick day to fly through it faster, resorted to reading it while blow-drying my hair in the mornings, and got so absorbed in it that I missed my evening train stop twice. I even read it covertly from the second row of Festival Albertine, while Gloria Steinem was introducing Roxane Gay. Nothing, no matter how singular or special, held my attention like this book did.
My devotion to this book was twofold – one part intense investment in the characters’ lives, one part a burning need to just get it over with. There were moments I rejoiced – crying hot happy tears at the adoption announcement, cheering JB’s gallery successes, laughing along with dinner party banter. But, by the end, I read A Little Life as one watches a horror movie – through squinted eyes, afraid of what’s to come.
A Little Life begins as the story of four friends, but its scope quickly narrows. It becomes the story of two men, then the story of just one, then the story of those who survive him. It’s also a New York story, a story anchored by long city walks, by runs on the West Side Highway, by the newsstands, restaurants, and theaters that give this city its distinct thrum. A Little Life is New York in all its grime and glory – the crush of poverty, the security of money, the ache of loneliness, and the arc of ambition.
This book’s exact time frame is unknown – no historical events or cultural references anchor it – but its place is incredibly specific. JB’s studio in Long Island City, Malcolm’s brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Andy’s practice on the Upper East Side. From my office window, I can see Malcolm’s onetime workplace, where Fifth Avenue and Broadway join. I’ve spent recent evenings walking Greene Street from Canal to Broome and sitting outside 56 Lispenard Street, engaged in a strange meditation on the apartments of fictional characters. I’ve basically taken the self-guided literary equivalent of those awful Sex and the City tours.
The writing here is remarkable in its invisibility. I was once a student in a writer’s workshop taught by Tim O’Brien, and he called my work “lit’ry,” by which he meant overly self-conscious and stylized. In Yanagihara’s world, there’s no such ornamentation, no showing off, and nothing to distract. Style is simply a conduit to the story.
That story infiltrated my world in ways big and small. A few days ago, while prepping my usual French Press, I stopped mid-pour, remembering that Jude hates the taste of coffee. The lines between my life and his had begun to blur. And, with every turn, A Little Life confronted me with difficult questions about my own choices and frailties – about self-destruction, about the lies we tell ourselves, and, most terribly, about what it all means and whether it matters in the end.
This is a book about compulsion, and it compelled me. When – spoiler alert – Jude attempted suicide, I couldn’t help but flip forward a hundred pages or so to find out if he was still alive. I did it again in the agonizing aftermath of the car crash, scanning pages in a panic for the mention of certain character names. Yet for all the pain, this is also a book about the beauty of relationships – not just the ‘will they or won’t they’ yearning that characterizes so many books, but also the moments of quiet contentment in a life spent together. Those moments, without exception, made up my favorite parts of A Little Life.
On Harold’s life with Julia:
“That Saturday evening, they had watched a movie together, and at one point, Harold and Julia had begun talking about the Truro house’s kitchen renovation. He had half dozed, listening to their quiet talk, which had been so dull that he couldn’t follow any of the details but had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.”
On the fictional life of JB’s parents:
“Interspersing the portraits were still lifes of the objects that had made JB’s parents’ lives together – two pillows on a bed, both slightly depressed as if someone had dragged the back of a spoon through a bowl of clotted cream; two coffee cups, one’s edge faintly pinked with lipstick; a single picture frame containing a photograph of a teenaged JB with his father. And seeing these images, he once again marveled at how perfect JB’s understanding was of a life together.”
On Jude’s life with Willem:
“It was precisely those scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable.
Everything in his apartment – Willem’s sweatpants, still slung over the edge of the laundry hamper; Willem’s toothbrush, still waiting in the glass on the bathroom sink; Willem’s watch, its face splintered from the accident, still sitting untouched on his nightstand – had become totemic, a series of runes only he could read.”
These passages, about the pieces and scenes that make up a life between two people, have really stuck with me. Near the end of A Little Life – deep in my ‘reading through jagged tears’ phase – Yanagihara reveals that Willem has gathered a lifetime of memories of Jude, and that Jude has in turn been numbing his grief by steeping himself in the sights and sounds of Willem – Willem’s face in film, Willem’s voice on phone messages. Jude wraps Willems’ clothes around him, tries to preserve his smell, starves to the point of delirium so he can hallucinate Willem’s presence. During an idle moment this week, I thumbed through my own phone’s camera roll, at the endless photos and videos of my husband. My husband dancing. My husband eating across from me at a restaurant table. My husband posing gamely in front of some street art or another. And I felt a lightning bolt of the worst ‘what ifs’ shoot through me. This book has made me keenly aware of how precious and fragile a happy life can be.
Finishing A Little Life felt at once like purging poison and like saying goodbye to a great friend. That it can be both – a cruel force and a great comfort – is why I love books generally and this one specifically. Read it (and yes, weep).