Back in the summer of 2023, I had a lot of free time on my hands and found myself alone at home for the majority of the season. I worked a serving job that seldom picked up in business, and therefore my eyes found themselves scanning the pages of books for hours on end. I read “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a classic by Betty Smith, but one book in particular has not quite disappeared from my thoughts since reading it.
I remember exactly why I picked it up initially. The back mentioned a group of college friends navigating life post-college throughout struggles of addiction and substance abuse, but one friend in particular was capable of holding them all together. A coming-of-age story that expanded throughout the course of their lives? Sign me up! Little did I know what I was getting myself into.
“A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara was published in 2015 and has since been the recipient of a Kirkus Prize and named a bestseller. The list of triggering topics related to this book can, in themselves, be considered a novel: sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, verbal abuse, psychological manipulation such as gaslighting, kidnapping/imprisonment, self-harm (lots of it), violence and gore, moments of discrimination against the disabled, drug-use, addiction, grief – and these are just the few that a user named Maranda on Goodreads mentions.
For those who I haven’t quite scared away yet, I kept my nose stuffed in this book for four straight days. With a novel of its size, consisting of 834 pages, I have never finished a literary work so quickly. I have heard from others that they needed to put the book down for a month or two to recover and keep going, while others put it down for good. Yanagihara’s fictional masterpiece takes patience, kindness and understanding to move through.
As the book follows the main character, Jude, his quirks are first stated in the beginning. We know that he cannot walk properly, that he is quiet and reserved, extremely smart but also a very loyal friend. He struggles a lot with internal mental health issues. The book slowly reveals his past trauma in sparse chapter flashbacks, piecing together a mosaic of how Jude’s personality came into fruition. As a reader, you naturally empathize with Jude and wish to give him a heartfelt hug. You want to push against everybody in Jude’s life that has treated him poorly, although Jude sees the best in them all and blames himself tirelessly. I believe that this aspect of the novel is the most heartbreaking: understanding that the main character has fallen into the perpetual cycle of victimhood and cannot break free.
The emotional experience of working through the plot is not an easy journey and Jude’s trust issues and mental illnesses passively get put onto the reader. I found myself halfway through questioning the trustworthiness of new characters, suspecting that they may not be as kind as they seem. With a character that has ultimately accumulated a chosen family, you wish for him to curate it in the best interest of himself. You want to tell Jude to prioritize himself, to love himself, to realize that his life’s circumstances are not his fault, although he seems to fully believe so.
I think that overall this book left a lasting impression, and I think about Jude to this day at least once a week. I left an Instagram poll on my story prior to beginning the book, asking people what their experiences were. Most of the responses consisted of something along the lines of “Get ready, prepare yourself, it was extremely emotionally draining,” yet none of the responses cautioned me against it.
I think that this book has gained an extreme amount of criticism, and I wish that I could explain a bit more of the plot without spoiling it, although it has been quite a while since I’ve read it. I definitely recommend this book to anybody who wants to emotionally connect with a fictional character, but get ready and prepare yourself. It is not an easy read, although it has the potential to be overwhelmingly consuming for the reader. While reading this book, I ultimately felt that I met the main character in real life and had an extremely hard time learning more about him as a friend. To rate this book on a numeral scale would minimize the emotional experience of making a valuable friend who seems to view his life as little, which it is anything but.