A Little Life
A Little Life
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Hanya Yanagihara on A Little Life
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A photograph, a refusal, and a life rarely depictedThe book’s emotional center crystallized around a single image Yanagihara encountered around 2004: Diane Arbus’s 1961 photograph ‘The Backwards Man in His Hotel Room,’ a contortionist whose body is torqued so his feet and head point in opposite directions. She had been keeping printouts and files of images for years, drawn to them without fully knowing why. When she began writing, she understood she had been assembling what would become the novel’s raw material, and this image was the one she returned to most.
When I saw it [Diane Arbus’s ‘The Backwards Man in His Hotel Room’], probably in 2004, I was struck by how completely, almost unbearably, it conveyed the state and feeling of loneliness. And not just loneliness, but the sense of being, literally, at odds with your own body.
The book’s structure required something American literary fiction almost never permits: a protagonist who does not get better. Yanagihara wanted to test a belief she holds about the limits of what suffering can actually do to a person, and the only way to test it was to refuse the recovery arc entirely.
One of the things I wanted to do with this book is create a character who never gets better. And, relatedly, to explore this idea that there is a level of trauma from which a person simply can’t recover. I do believe that really, we can sustain only a finite amount of suffering.
Yanagihara graduated from Smith College, an all-women’s institution, and arrived in New York in the mid-1990s with almost no experience of young adult men. The friendships she built afterward, many of them with gay men in the city, gave her a subject she had not set out looking for. She became absorbed by a specific gap she kept observing: the distance between what these men felt and the words they had for it. That gap is structural to the novel’s length.
It is a book in which the characters literally cannot speak that often — they don’t know how to express what they cannot quite name. One of the reasons it is so long is because these characters cannot make conversation about a subject they have not been taught to identify, much less express, and so it comes out in different ways and takes longer.
Yanagihara has never married and has no children; her closest circle in New York lives similarly. She describes this not as a lack but as a mode of existence that fiction almost never takes seriously on its own terms. The book was in part a corrective to that absence.
Part of this book is an homage to the way my friends and I live: lives without children, without marriage, lives you rarely see depicted in popular art, unless as a punch line or a tragedy, lives not considered by many to be full, legitimate adulthood.
How she wrote it
Eighteen months, four images, and one miserable week in JapanYanagihara held her Condé Nast Traveler editor job throughout the entire writing of the book, working four days a week and writing in the hours that remained. The pace left a specific physical mark she describes without nostalgia.
I wrote my second novel, A Little Life, in what I still think of as a fever dream. For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.
Before any sentence was written, images preceded them. Yanagihara had been collecting photographs and drawings since her mid-twenties: Todd Hido’s interiors of abandoned motel rooms shaped Jude’s childhood spaces; Geoffrey Chadsey’s drawings of clusters of young men gave her the physical world of Willem and JB. Each image functioned as a calibration device rather than a direct source.
It was these images I returned to, again and again: They provided a sort of tonal sound check, as it were — was I conveying in words and scenes what I felt when I saw these photographs and paintings?
The distinction matters: she was not translating images into prose but using them to test whether her prose was reaching the register she intended.
One section of the novel required four days of writing that she describes as distinct from anything else in the project. She was on her annual autumn trip to Japan when she hit the section covering Jude’s time with Dr. Traylor, and she found she could not set it aside to sightsee. She cut her days short, returned to the hotel by 4pm, and wrote until the early hours of the morning.
It was the worst — the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating — writing experience I’d had.
The novel erases all external historical markers: no September 11, no named president, no datable cultural reference. This was not an oversight but a deliberate entrapment. By sealing the characters off from the outside world, Yanagihara foreclosed a particular kind of readerly escape.
By taking those things out, what I was really doing was trapping readers in the emotional world of these particular characters, so that it felt incredibly intimate, claustrophobic... the trade-off is, of course, that you are now a prisoner of this world.
Her editor at Doubleday pushed back on the accumulating horror, and the argument forced her to articulate exactly what she understood her obligation to the reader to be. She refused to cut, and her refusal rested on a precise limit she had set for herself.
I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high.
The book’s large-scale organization was musical in her mind from the beginning. She described this analogy at a 2016 Library Foundation of Los Angeles event, connecting it to a technique of repetition and return that runs through the novel’s 375,000 words.
The book is arranged and structured like a symphony. The little themes that come up… I really want it to feel like a little bit of melody that loops in again and again.
The personal thread
Her best friend as first reader and mirrorYanagihara’s best friend Jared Hohlt received each chapter as she finished it, and they met every Friday evening to discuss what she had written. Those conversations became something other than editorial feedback.
They inevitably bled into the book and it became a discussion about friendship — about our friendship, friendship in general, what we expect from one another as humans and what we can provide to one another.
The letters the book eventually drew from readers arriving with their own histories of abuse surprised her in their specificity. Many came from men, a demographic she had not expected to reach in this way, and they told her something she found both moving and troubling about what contemporary society fails to make safe for boys to say.
I’ve heard from many men about this book, some of whom tell me things they’ve not told people before and I just think, ‘God, we’re really failing as a society if young men... didn’t feel that they could say [as children] to someone “I’ve been abused or I’ve been hurt” because they felt it would make them less of a man.’
On what the book is wrestling with
Psychology, death, and the question fiction avoidsYanagihara’s skepticism about psychology is not incidental to the book. She makes a specific complaint about the field: that it holds a position no other medical specialty holds, one she finds intellectually dishonest. She used the novel to pursue what she sees as the more honest position.
One of the things that makes me most suspicious about the field is its insistence that life is always the answer.
The sustained ugliness in the novel was a deliberate choice she made at the outset, and she distinguishes her purpose from the easier explanations critics offered. She was not reaching for shock. She was reaching for something closer to documentary fidelity to how lives are actually spent.
I wanted the reader to spend time with a great deal of ugliness, not to shock or titillate or appal or repulse, but because it’s the human condition to spend time with people who do things that sadden and upset and dismay us.
The Waterstones interview, held in connection with the stage adaptation of the novel, gave Yanagihara the chance to say plainly what she believed Jude’s story ultimately argues. It is a formulation that sits against the book’s reputation for unrelieved darkness.
It’s about a difficult life and it’s someone who has had so much taken from him and the things that he retains are the ability to love and be loved. And you can lose almost everything else in life but if you hold on to those two qualities, you will have joy in your life. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Friendship as the first and most necessary choiceYanagihara wants the book read as a genuine argument, not a lament. She describes friendship as the relationship that modern culture systematically undervalues, and she locates the first act of friendship in something a child does before they have words for it.
Friendship is a much more elemental, more necessary, and more sustaining relationship than we give it credit for being.
She wrote the book as an outsider to the literary life she was entering: no MFA, no workshop, no network. When she described, years after publication, what the book’s reception meant to her, she said it in terms that measured the distance between what she had risked and what had come back.
The fact that it has found a home and has resonated with so many people is the honor of my life.