A Little Life

things i liked:
1. beautifully written
2. good representation

things i didn't like:
1. so much shit happened in Jude's childhood, maybe a little too much, made me a bit numb
2. plateaued a little in the middle of the book. while i understand it's meant to be more detail-oriented, it needed a little bit of more momentum from the story line.
3. i just wish Jude was a little bit less self-pitying
4. it felt a little feminine, maybe because it was written by a female author. she didn't understand the male psyche well enough (in my personal opinion)

This book's a real tearjerker! As other reviewers said though, in parts it might feel forced. I don't mind heavy subject matters, but this would have gotten 5 stars from me only if some of the heaviness was better balanced. E.g. maybe some of Jude's heavy struggles could've been replaced with another character's POV having more defined ups and downs.

I get that the point is to emphasise how isolated Jude feels with his big problems compared to his friends' 'normal' problems, but that concept didn't need to be taken to the extremes that it was. After a point it really was numbing and just piling on struggles didn't add to the emotional impact anymore.

Read this a couple months ago and just had to get through the last couple tens of pages. The book is...a lot; you have four characters, and in the beginning it feels confusing because you can't keep track of all of them. Eventually, you keep focus on two of them, while one has episodic appearances and the other one is literally there just to design the others' apartments; I would've loved to see Malcom join the others a lot more, because otherwise this feels like a three friends and another person scenario rather than the four friends that share a deep bond type thing that the synopsis indicated. I've honestly picked up this book because I have heard many individuals talk about how this book made them bawl so hard, so I had to check it out. While the few chapters that talk about Jude's past experiences are considerably graphic and can be triggering to some individuals, I can't but feel that the author has diluted the level of seriousness that the scenes should have had; throughout the book, all the characters want to know things about Jude's past and it is always described as something horrific and gruesome, and as such, you have this sensation that the author couldn't control themselves to keep the twist and secret for the end and left little bits across the book to sort of keep you involved.
Leaving that aside, the book is realistic; the characters are vivid and their relationships are similar to those that adults have in real life. The progression is believable, and the book correctly describes how one should act and behave with a friend that has a troubled past. It might be just the fact that I have read them after a couple of months and while I was reading something completely different, but the last twenty pages really saved the book and brought it from questionably mediocre to a decent contemporary novel.

“Life is so sad. It's so sad, and yet we'll do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.”

4.5 I think???? Maybe.

Non-spoilers: The writing of this book is beautiful, but it has some parts that seemed unnecessary to elongate the story where it didn't really have to. Once knowing the focus characters and incidents, it's easy to skim over parts that didn't connect too much to the story. The synopsis of the book threw me off, as it is true, but the centerpiece of the story is slightly off from it, particularly regarding the friends. I was more frustrated and angry with many of the parts of the story, shocking images of all that's happened.

Spoilers: I was so angry at Jude throughout the entire book because he refused therapy, the idea of "I deserve this", and rejection of help for the majority of the book. But now with the ending, I'm not sure what to feel. How do you even feel after that? All the anger poofed after Willem's death; the most impacting moment for me was when Jude imagined himself with Willem's arms around him, the sandalwood scent on his clothes that eventually faded, desperately trying to conserve and save it in the closet. Can I think about sandalwood the same way before I read the book? Probably not. I feel that pretty much everything in this book is all unfortunate things that happen in life. It's so sad, yet we do it. It's so painful, yet we resort to dark thoughts and pain. Can we help people? Yeah. Can we try to fix someone? As much as we want to, people won't accept, won't see how much you care, won't give in. And that's reality sometimes.Edit: After some discussion in the BLC, it's understandable that Jude didn't want to accept therapy because he didn't want to expose himself and relive everything of the past. It seemed easier just to keep it in. It's still just heartbreaking that nothing would, will, and can heal someone like Jude.

[ it's only appropriate that this is my first review as it's the first book that i started while on goodreads ]

i wanted to like this. i really did. it was recommended by a youtuber for someone looking for a book that helps with post-grad funk, but it helped very little with that. note: i listened to the audiobook rather than read a hard copy.

you can only suspend disbelief so much. while there are issues addressed in this book that do happen to people every day, it's unrealistic that the author prefaced 4 diverse and different friends but lumped all of the problems, trauma, and “bad stuff” onto one of those friends. as more traumatic events were added to this character's story, i found it harder and harder to hold interest.

this is a good book for someone looking to hear about a (very) fictional character's lifelong strife. this is not a good book for someone looking to perk up during a tough time.

My face is tight with tears drying from my cheeks as I write this review for Hanya's paragon of fiction. A Little Life will be a novel perpetually present in my life - the nuanced lessons changing with each decade. In my 20s, I am reading a novel reflexive of the maturing into ourselves we do during this period. The deep friendships we build our lives around, the friends we keep, then lose, then bring back. Our frustrating inability to fully and appropriately react to those in our lives with different privileges, or those with very few. How piercing it is to see someone we love so incredibly deeply and uniquely unable to ever see what we love about them in themselves.

The novel's focus transformed - like a funnel. First deeply analyzing a unique group of four friends, then pulling forward the two bounded by the most uncertainty in their prior lives, then one. The main character the entire time - Jude. The way Hanya supports the optimistic (and privileged) reader rooting for a character so tortuous left me in a puddle at every major event Hanya delivers. And she delivers these moments in a way that mirrors moments in our lives. I compared my own stories, my own friendships in my 20s with the way she laid out the first quarter of the novel. I can't even imagine what will come when I re-read this novel in my 30s, in my 40s, in my 50s... but I can't imagine crying less.

One sentence synopsis... ‘A Little Life' begins as a conventional postgrad New York ensemble but it quickly becomes evident Yanagihara has something much darker and unsettling in mind for her four unforgettable friends. .

Read it if you like... crying. Screaming at books. Simultaneously hating the author for putting her characters through this while also loving her for creating such an all-consuming story. Don't read it if you like happy endings. .

Dream casting... Robert Pattinson, Armie Hammer, or Garrett Hedlund as Willem Ragnarsson. John Boyega is the only JB. If anyone's read the book and has people in mind I'd love to know what you pictured.

I'm of a generation that is the product of unedited violence, true crime television, overdramatized news broadcasts teaching me about the horrors outside my own home + inside my own head.

For all the engrained desensitization, I still found myself having to close this book, walk outside, hug a stranger - grab onto something light, something good.

Exquisite writing.

This book will break your heart.
You must prepare to be collapsed by the realities of injustice.

But you just must power through to experience the unconditional love on profound display.

First, this author uses a strange (and which I consider sloppy) literary device: they changes characters without specifying them by name. A new paragraph/chapter/section will just start talking about “he” and “him” and the reader has to guess between four, then five main male characters who “he” is.
Also, once before I stopped reading, the POV radically changes and “he” starts talking to the reader. What?

Second, this novel blatantly and loudly fails the Bedchel test. Women flit in and out, never to be seen again, only known as this person's lesbian friend or that person's coworker. The one long-standing female character exists to be a wife, and never has s conversation about anything but her husband or the main focus of the novel, the wounded main-child. All the women are two-dimensional props.

Which brings me to the main reason I cannot finish this novel:
Third, I truly feel this novel fetishizes/glorifies (choose your verb) trauma, self-harm, and resulting toxic behavior and relationships. I say this as someone with CPTSD and currently in CPTSD immersion therapy, someone who is chronically ill with an autoimmune disorder and who has to use a wheelchair in public. The behaviors that draw people inexplicably to Jude—violent self-harm over years, egregious medical self-neglect, strict and seemingly random friendship rules (don't ask questions about x y z, don't take my photograph, I need to be checked on twice a day or Bad Things Might Happen)—are personality-disordered behaviors that in real life either drive people away or create horribly toxic relationships.
Granted, both Andy and Jude so far seem to understand that their relationship is both inappropriate and toxic, but Jude has this dreamy ideal vision of his rescue-victim friendship with Willem...and Willem seems to think it's completely normally to be living only half a life because the other half is being sucked up by Jude's ever-growing needs. And what bothers me is this doesn't feel like storytelling—I have read many, many well-crafted novels about horrific relationships. It feels to me as reader that the writer feels this is normal, or that this is fantasy-fulfillment to the writer. I know I am getting rather personal in this review, but this novel has upset me in a most uncomfortable way, to the point that I may need to discuss it in therapy. There is something wrong here. I wish I could flush the 33 percent I have read from my system.

Jesus. This gets five stars, for sure, with the caveat that it's not without fault; there comes a point where the series of traumas and degradations that befall Jude lose their potency as tools for character development and simply become wearying. But this book is beautiful, and full of characters that will rip your heart out.

I didn't take to this book as fast as I did to Yanagihara's debut; it was more of a slow burner.

There were several moments where I almost quit reading: about halfway when I realised just how sad it was going to be, then again at about three quarters in when my perspective shifted from a reader following a plot to someone perched on the writer's shoulder as she tortures a voodoo doll of a character. If this was a manuscript I would've sent it back right then bookmarked at around page 400 saying “this is where I become disengaged”.

I thought she'd completely lost me when I started finding all those calamities grotesque and when my analysis fixed itself on “UGH Yanagihara give this man a break!!!” At that point the only thing that could redeem this book for me was an elegant ending.

And boy did she deliver. It was so smooth I almost missed it. I finished the book late at night, desperate to be done with it and with all the sadness and when it was done I went to sleep a bit sad but also unburdened. But then a few hours later I woke up like OHHHHHHHHHHHH and I got it, and I gave Yanagihara a mental slow clap for it. Then I cried for a couple of hours because it was just so damn sad.

I'm so emotionally drained I'll be reading nothing but non-fiction for several months now.

This book made me feel quite a few things, but mostly I was just grossed out and exhausted. I can see why a lot of people love it, but it wasn't for me. I didn't need graphic descriptions of things everyone already knows are wrong to feel bad for a character. I felt bad for him already. I liked the writing style but felt it could've been trimmed down by 100-200 pages.

I have no idea how to rate this book. I glared at it most of the time; couldn't toss it; and was grateful for the ending. I have nothing articulate to say beyond that, except much of my reading was spent thinking how Catholic and 21st century this book was. But just now I wonder if we can throw in Hardy and Jude the obscure too (another inordinately difficult book)?

Struggles presented as universal take on a quality of mocking delusion when the excess of protagonists (only male voices) all become famous millionaires at the top of their fields who own fabulous and plural homes and have access to private jets and Alhambra strolls. The decided main character also has riches in an expansive circle of equally jet-setting friends who over the span of decades never give up on him despite constant vehement testing-our-friendship pushback. We're told they remain devoted and compassionate yet none ever actually do rudimentary research on how to, if not guide him to knowledgeable help, talk to him and make steps to reposition the thinking and identity of a friend who has lived through extremities of harm. The glamour and American dreaming has its counterbalance in a childhood filled with horrors heaped on horrors of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse.

On the length, some expert editing could have kept out:

- White-adjacent ‘post-racial' musings offensively put into Malcolm's voice, besides the pretense that it's a story about four friends
- The additional fantasy of a ‘post-queer' landscape
- The transphobic introduction to Edie's party
- All subject-/interlocutor-vague narration from Harold (in fact letters to a painting of Willem's face) that diminishes Harold's character (‘You asked me once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had always known. But that wasn't true, and I knew it even as I said it—I said it because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a movie...')
- Dr. Traylor and his sex dungeon. How did Dr. Traylor even get caught? I had imagined Jude's legs being broken by Jude grabbing the wheel from Brother Luke to steer themselves into oncoming traffic to end his contrivedly torturous life
- The continuation of over the top villainous violence in Caleb
- About 50 pages reiterating self-harm
- The author's dismissal of psychiatry except maybe for the truly damaged in Willem's voice
- The jokes shared between Jude and Willem, which all fall unendearing not to mention unconvincing as connection
- A listing of every New York street the characters put their feet on
- How each of their friends die in the end

Even if it had been thoughtfully pruned and calibrated to a relatable scale, the novel's early glimmers of resonance could not survive the author's carrel of privilege and vision for suffering. The exploration of the aftermath of childhood trauma and the role of friendship in the potentiality of healing is weightily disrespected.

4.75/5 (rounded up)

This book has been the subject of significant controversy, with readers either absolutely loving it or absolutely hating it which of course, made me decide to take it on as a challenge. I personally really liked this book.

I have heard many people, especially book reviewers on Youtube, say this book is too horrific and disturbing to read at all and I would have to disagree. I'm convinced that those who are encouraging people not to read it because it is too disturbing to even imagine are people who have never experienced the SERIOUS mental illness that Jude does. This is not to say that they have not had mental health struggles, just that they have not experienced the thought processes and mindset that Jude did in this novel.

As someone who has had some of the same thoughts about myself as Jude did in this book, it made me feel, frankly, a little less crazy. Many of the things he said, no matter how sad and horrific, are things that I have thought before and it really made me feel seen and that there are others who struggle in a similar manner. Though I've never experienced anything close to the trauma Jude did, I definitely feel empathy for the things he was thinking and saying.

This book is definitely disturbing, difficult to read and heart-breaking but that does not mean it should not be read and experienced by people. It is not a book for everyone, that is for sure, but don't let other readers deter the intrigue you have to read this book.

CHECK THE TRIGGERS WARNINGS BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY. But this is a great book, a little slow at times which is my only reason for knocking off a star because it is a very long book, but an understanding one for many of us who struggle with serious mental illness.

I need to know... who is recommending this book and to please STOP!!!!

A Little life was absolutely beautifully written I'll give it that and that is why it is getting 4 stars. Otherwise, this is not a book for anyone who has been through any type of trauma nor is it a book for someone who is not in a good mental space. It often felt like trauma porn which shouldn't be a thing but clearly is. Please consider your mental well-being before picking up this book.