A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara, 2015
★ 4.26 from 1m ratings on Goodreads
Four friends arrive in New York after college and try to make art, money, and a family out of one another. The book moves with a tender, plain voice and a long sense of time, tracing friendship and defiance while sadness gathers around the characters.
Feels like tenderness, defiance and melancholy. About friendship, time and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to long literary novels about friendship, art, and chosen family, and to characters you follow over decades. Be warned that many readers find the suffering relentless and the treatment of abuse, disability, and mental health hard to take.
Why read it
It offers a close, patient look at how friendship can hold people together and at what it costs to keep going; the prose stays direct even when the story grows heavy.
A page from the book
The hardest part of friendship is letting someone tell you the truth.
JB was going through, as he put it, his hair phase. Recently he had decided to take a break from painting in favor of making sculptures from black hair. Each of them had spent an exhausting weekend following JB from barbershop to beauty shop in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan, waiting outside as JB went in to ask the owners for any sweepings or cuttings they might have, and then lugging an increasingly awkward bag of hair down the street after him. His early pieces had included The Mace, a tennis ball that he had de-fuzzed, sliced in half, and filled with sand before coating it in glue and rolling it around and around in a carpet of hair so that the bristles moved like seaweed underwater, and “The Kwotidien,” in which he covered various household items—a stapler; a spatula; a teacup—in pelts of hair. What readers say
Readers are split: many describe intense sadness, crying, and attachment to the characters, while others are angered by relentless suffering, abuse, and what they see as manipulative or exploitative treatment of trauma, disability, and mental health.
Hanya Yanagihara.Before she became editor of T, Yanagihara worked at Condé Nast Traveler—the day job she held while writing A Little Life.
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Questions readers ask
- Is A Little Life for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to long literary novels about friendship, art, and chosen family, and to characters you follow over decades. Be warned that many readers find the suffering relentless and the treatment of abuse, disability, and mental health hard to take.
- What is A Little Life like?
- The book moves with a tender, plain voice and a long sense of time, tracing friendship and defiance while sadness gathers around the characters. Feels like tenderness, defiance and melancholy. About friendship, time and memory.
- What should I read after A Little Life?
- If you liked A Little Life, try The Secret History (Donna Tartt), Normal People (Sally Rooney) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini).
A taste of the feed
The idea that a life has one crack running down it, decided in advance.
DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
The Secret History · Donna Tartt
How long it takes before cruelty becomes ordinary.
It wasn’t easy tolerating him talking this way to her, to bear his scorn, his ridicule, his insults, his walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat. But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid. And Mariam was afraid.
A Thousand Splendid Suns · Khaled Hosseini
What it costs to keep believing in a piece of land you'll never own.
They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.
Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck
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