If you were to pick up a copy of Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life, you would see that the critics have not been stinting in their praise.
The book has been described as “ a masterwork”, “epic”, and “astonishing” while Yanagihara herself has been called “a major American novelist.” The one person you might expect to know this is the author, but Yanagihara tells me she has been avoiding the press.

“I don’t read reviews so I am kind of in a cloud of ignorance, which I think you have to do or you’d go crazy otherwise,” she explains. “It was a real struggle to get the book published. I think the publishing houses, in America at least, were not really sure how it was going to be received. My hope for it was that I would find a few dozen people who really took it to heart and loved it, but I didn’t hope for more than that.”
A Little Life is a story about four close friends — Jude, Willem, Malcolm and JB — and the novel examines their relationships with one another in depth.
“The one thing I am interested in, male friendship, is the way it is distinct from the way women conduct friendships with one another, or the way men and women conduct friendships with each other. The thing that always strikes me when I watch my male friends is that they won’t discuss certain things with one another. That’s not bad necessarily, but it is curious to watch. Even if it’s something they would discuss with their female friends, there seems to be some sort of invisible border that they dare not cross. That doesn’t mean that the friendship isn’t as profound or meaningful as any other. It is easy to get into these clichés saying, ‘Men don’t really speak’ or ‘They don’t give voice to emotions’ and in some ways that may be true. It is more contained or less expressed, but it doesn’t mean it’s any less of a relationship.”
A Little Life opens as a New York bildungsroman, as the four young men begin their careers, only to take an unexpected turn into an examination of the aftermath of the severe childhood abuse suffered by Jude. Did Yanagihara plan to lull the reader into thinking it was one kind of book, only to change direction?
“Completely!” she laughs. “I love the sub-genre of literary fiction about friends coming to the big city after college. I wanted it to feel a little sprite, a little arch, and a little bouncy at the beginning and when the reader is feeling comfortable, I wanted it to turn it into something else. It is a bit of a trick, a twist for the reader.”
Like his friends, the reader knows something awful happened to Jude when he was younger, and as the novel progresses Yanagihara allows the full extent of the abuse to be revealed.
“I think of this book as something that begins as something light then shades into something dark, but I hope it happens slowly enough that the reader doesn’t feel emotionally manipulated as much as emotionally devastated and I hope the reader’s reaction mirrors that of Jude’s friends,” she says.
The severity of the abuse Jude has suffered is difficult to read, but says Yanagihara, it was easy to write.
“I wouldn’t say it was a thrilling writing experience except it was because I knew exactly where I was going. Simply in terms of technicalities, in laying down words, it was very easy. It wasn’t particularly emotionally difficult. To me the more emotionally difficult part was having to write what happened to him as an adult in the aftermath of the abuse. I am fascinated by how people who have endured such difficulties are able to fashion lives for themselves.”
As well as friendship, the book features a central romantic relationship between two men, neither of whom can definitely be described as gay. For many of the characters, their sexual identity is in flux, and only JB strongly identifies as homosexual.
“When I originally turned in the manuscript for this book, my agent said, ‘There are far too many gay people in the book!’ But if you work in a certain industry in a certain type of city, you’re probably going to have lots of gay friends. I thought it made perfect sense — the circles that I work in, the people I know, it is certainly true that straight men and gay men would be hanging out in the way these characters are, but it’s not true for everywhere, even within New York.”
The book’s main characters have varying racial, ethnic and sexual identities, but none are female or Asian. This, explains Yanagihara, was a very deliberate choice.
“It is liberating to write very different characters, but these characters are also yourself in many ways. You leave a bit of yourself in every one. One of the thing I found interesting is that people have been really outraged by that. A couple of people have also told me that they think it’s a very anti-woman book. People have asked me if I knew that there are no women characters in the book, and of course I know. It’s a book where there are a lot of absences, and the absences, I hope, are as significant as the presences. Originally there were no women at all but it was beginning to feel really strained so I put a few in, but they’re not the focus of the book. The book is about male friendships, and these particular male friendships.”
Although the characters are very different to Yanagihara, the novel feels intimate, and she describes the book as “personal emotionally”.
“Young writers are always told to write what they know. Writing what you know doesn’t mean writing a character that grew up like you, who looks like you, or even who thinks like you, but a novel is always in some sense an emotional memoir. It does reflect how you look at the world, how you look at relationships – and if it doesn’t sound too grand, what the meaning of life is.
“The book was written in conversation with my best friend.
I would write a section and give it to him. He would respond with his thoughts and I would write back to him with about a dozen questions. We met every Friday to discuss the book. Those conversations 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. In that way it is very personal, but I didn’t realise how personal it was until I stopped writing.”