A Little Life

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.