63 pages • 2-hour read
A Little Life
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Book Club Questions
Tools
Themes
The Limits of Wealth as a Cure for Trauma
Jude’s entire adult social circle is made up of extremely wealthy people. Malcolm, JB, and Willem all rise to the top of their artistic fields; Harold is not just a professor at an Ivy League university, but a famous and popular author as well. The friends Jude makes early in his law career end up doing equally well for themselves. Jude himself procures a spot at a top New York City law firm in his thirties. They are people who can afford to buy multiple houses in multiple cities, traveling between them as need or whim dictates. They can take lavish vacations at a moment’s notice. They give each other expensive gifts for celebrations and anniversaries. Jude and Willem even have their own signature scents; Willem contracts a perfumer in Europe to create them and continues to buy them on special order until his death.
On one level, the extraordinary success of this group is not entirely surprising; people tend to make friends with people who inhabit similar socioeconomic worlds as themselves. However, it does stretch plausibility that so many people who were not fabulously wealthy when they met all became fabulously wealthy later. One reason Yanagihara may have for parading this lavish wealth in front of the reader is to underline that some trauma is too profound to recover from, even with extravagant riches to expend on the effort.
As Jude’s physical and emotional struggles become more apparent to his friend group, they pour their considerable resources into helping him. After Jude has to climb up five flights of stairs with his fragile legs because his apartment building’s elevator is broken and hurts himself horribly in the process, a wealthy friend named Richard offers to sell him a loft in his building with a reliable working elevator. Richard has this loft to sell because he inherited a whole building full of spacious lofts from his father. Malcolm offers his design services, constructing two elegantly ADA-compliant houses for Jude, his city apartment and his country retreat. Jude even has, through his friends, connections to private jets to enable stress-free travel despite his physical limitations.
An ordinary person with Jude’s same physical and emotional problems living in New York City would likely either be drowning in medical debt or gritting their teeth through pain to avoid drowning in medical debt. They certainly would not be enjoying European vacations, special homes designed just for their needs, or offers to buy a New York City loft at a spectacularly discounted rate. If endless resources were the cure to trauma, Jude would be cured many times over. Yet by the end of the novel, readers see that even his and his friends’ spectacular wealth could not heal the damage done by his childhood. Without a doubt, the wealth that surrounds him makes his life infinitely more comfortable than it might have been had he remained a penniless waif, but ultimately, it is not enough.
The Value of Friendships and Chosen Family
In Jude’s world, friendships are bonds as close as family—for some characters, much closer than family. Most of those in Jude’s social circle do not hold bonds of blood as a more sacred or important connection than their friendships. In fact, the bonds they choose for themselves, their chosen families, are the ones they pour their time and energy into, cultivating the relationships with great care over decades.
While there is no shortage of books, movies, or television shows that reflect on how much work romantic relationships require, friendships are often not treated with the same reverence. They are often considered an easier kind of relationship to maintain, one less fraught and more mellow. In contrast, A Little Life posits that meaningful adult friendships require as much work and tending as any romantic relationship and that without sustained effort they fade away. Time after time, Jude’s friends show that they are as devoted to him as any family member could be. They celebrate his victories, as when dozens of them travel across state lines or even continents on his adoption day to witness the happy moment. They support him in his weakness, as when they stage an intervention in response to his voluntary starvation. In short, they love him with a constancy that many books, television shows, and movies reserve only for biological family members or romantic partners.
Both Jude and Willem have particular reason to covet the close bonds of a chosen family. Deprived of both family and friends growing up, Jude has trouble accepting that anyone would ever choose him for any kind of relationship but is grateful that many people do so once he gets to college and law school. Willem grew up with cold, distant parents who always seemed more concerned with the practical details of child rearing than with creating emotional bonds. This shared need between Jude and Willem is probably one reason that the two gravitate toward each other more strongly than they gravitate to JB and Malcolm, who did not have perfect childhoods but did grow up with loving families.
When Harold and Julia adopt Jude, their decision feels like an incomparable gift because their non-biological relationship to him means they had to choose a familial bond with him. As someone abandoned by his parents as a baby, no act could be more precious to Jude. However, he still misapprehends the nature of Harold and Julia’s bond to him. Because they chose a familial relationship with him rather than being forced into that relationship through blood, Jude believes they could withdraw their commitment to him should he prove himself undesirable enough. The great tragedy of Jude’s adult life is that while he has a chosen family with a devotion to him that the average person would greatly envy, he can never believe their love for him is unconditional.
Ableism’s Effects on the Disabled Community
Throughout A Little Life, Jude’s physical pain is as constant a presence as his emotional pain. After Dr. Traylor ran over him with a car when Jude was a teen, Jude’s legs are damaged. He experiences chronic pain in the form of flare-ups that come without warning and leave him unable to do anything but lay down and wait. The skin on his legs is also compromised, meaning that any minor cuts or bruises to them are slow to heal and quick to become infected. Until Andy convinces him to undergo amputation and get prosthetic legs below the knee, he intermittently requires a wheelchair when experiencing periods of acute pain.
By centralizing Jude’s physical pain, Yanagihara spotlights how difficult life can be for people with disabilities in societies that practice ableism by making everyday activities inaccessible to the disabled community. Caleb embodies ableism at its most grotesque, shaming Jude for needing a wheelchair and calling him weak for not being able to magically transcend the results of his injury. But it is not only Caleb that makes life difficult for Jude. The landlord of Jude and Willem’s Lispenard Street apartment does not prioritize elevator maintenance despite the presence of a tenant who often requires a wheelchair, resulting in Jude, on one occasion, blacking out from the pain of having to climb five flights of stairs while hauling his wheelchair behind him. Jude takes his job at a corporate law firm rather than staying in public service because he is afraid of the mounting medical costs he might accrue in old age. Even something as simple as getting to work is difficult to navigate in his wheelchair, forcing him to calculate the cost of cabs as he decides which employment opportunities to pursue. While he does end up liking his corporate law firm job, his choices nevertheless narrow to accommodate his medical needs because no social safety net exists to ensure he will be cared for without enormous personal wealth.
Jude feels great shame over his disability, and while part of this feeling comes from his high propensity to shame in general, part of it also comes from social messaging that does not accommodate people with disabilities and therefore makes Jude feel excluded and inferior. He does not even self-identify as a person with a disability until over halfway through the novel, shortly before his leg injuries become so compromised that he requires amputation. Feeling damaged in a hundred different ways, he is unwilling to voluntarily take on the label “disabled,” as if identifying this way will make him even more disgusting to his loved ones. He fails to see that they accept his disability long before he does and make efforts to accommodate it, such as Malcolm’s accessible designs for his loft and country house. Lacking any connections to a larger community of people with disabilities that might help him see himself in a different light, Jude is unable to see his disability as anything other than one in a long list of ways that he is a burden to his friends.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence