"A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged with addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable brotherly trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara's stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves." 

tw: self-harm, suicide, mental illness, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, pedophilia, sex trafficking, child sexual abuse, grief, drug use

i reveal one of my very few single star books!

the only person i would recommend this book to, are people i hate and psychopaths, because you have to be an absolute insane person to enjoy its contents. but in all honesty, i don't think anybody should be reading this book, and if anyone is, bookstores need to check your ID to make sure that you are at least twenty years old. i'm nineteen years old right now and i don't think i'm old enough to have read this book. it does not matter whether you think you are in a good enough place to read this book, i can assure you that you are not. 

throughout the novel, my heart never stopped weeping for jude regardless of the fact that he is a fictional character. my heart ached for him. yanagihara stabbed herself in the back and twisted the hilt. she constructs a kind and innocent character in the beginning only to put him through hell and back and hell and back, over and over. now with that being said, i could understand she made jude a walking trauma vessel in order to accomplish some sort of point, an end goal. however, by the time i finished this book i had no idea what i was supposed to gain other than that suicide is a viable option when life gets difficult. 

yanagihara uses jude's character in order to have shock value within her novel through excruciatingly intense and heavy amounts of trauma porn on almost every page. i concluded the book having learned absolutely nothing other than that i should remember to check the trigger warnings the next time i purchase a book. the author actively puts the reader through hell alongside jude.

while i describe the events that took place in this book as trauma porn, i am not at all insinuating that nobody has ever experienced the things that have happened to jude. victims of sexual and domestic abuse are real and they take very serious tolls on real people. but with that being said, a little life is not a memoir or based on true events, but a figment out of yanagihara's imagination that has evolved into the most grotesque and descriptive book i've ever read. the author has taken some of the worst traumas that a person can face in their life, and used it to tell a fictional story that would hurt the reader and elicit a reaction to keep them enticed, hoping that jude will be able to find a way to escape the cycle of misery but he never does. 

in addition, within the context of the whole book, it felt as if yanagihara gave him a brutal past in order to "justify" the intensity of his mental illnesses. jude's character circulates his traumatizing past, his hatred for being disabled, and self harm to the point where his character stopped meaning anything more than his hurt. realistically, one can be mentally ill without knowing exactly why, there is no need to justify jude's self harm and suicidal ideation through traumatizing event after traumatizing event. 

there are countless individuals who have lost their battle to mental illness and countless more who fight every single day to stay alive, and this book is not the representation needed to de-stigmatize mental health. trauma and mental illness are real things that affect real people, not a plot device to exploit and take advantage of in order to keep the story moving. 

in addition to how yanagihara disrespects victims and disabled people, i have issues with how the novel is jarringly different from its summary (written above). as a person who went into reading this book knowing absolutely nothing about it, i was taken aback once i had realized what the real plot was about. the other two "main characters" are malcolm and jb, yet we hardly get to see them. they lacked any serious or genuine characterization with a vast majority of the story surrounding jude and willem. 

the only thing i remotely enjoyed reading this book was the few moments during "the happy years" section of the novel, getting to see interactions amongst the characters that weren't constantly consumed with jude. but those were hard to come by. 

every single one of jude's relationships failed him. there is no argument there. people aren't suppose to be complicit with the self-destructive nature of the people they love, regardless of the consequences. andy especially, as his doctor. there are no exceptions. 

lastly, there are disagreements i have with the way that yanagihara decided to write this book as well as her own personal philosophy that influenced the graphic and uncomfortable nature of its plot. 

according to an interview with electric literature (linked below) yanagihara does not believe in trigger warnings, thinking that it is dangerous to "isolate oneself from information or art or history or news because the subject is painful" and that living means that "allowing yourself to be intellectually and emotionally vulnerable as much and as often as you can." yanagihara believes that we should not turn away from content just because it can be "uncomfortable," and that "we never really know how we’re going to react until we start reacting." if anything, i find this logic to be way more dangerous than any trigger warning could ever be, considering a little life is one of the most triggering books i have ever read. if i was given the power to legally require a trigger warning for one piece of media in the world, it would be this book.

in that same interview, yanagihara also goes to mention that she "didn’t do any research" on victims of sexual abuse and that "Jude came to me fully formed, and writing his sections were always the easiest." i find this careless, and concerning. jude, a character who suffers from multiple debilitating traumas, was the "easiest" to write, lets think about that for a second. 

the last thing i want to add is yanagihara's position on therapy and the overall treatment for mental illnesses. she clarifies that she "doesn't believe in it—talk therapy" and that in terms of dealing with mental illness, similar to physical health, "there are points at which death is preferable to life," essentially advocating for psychiatrists to give severely mentally ill patients their permission to die." speaking of dangerous, yanagihara's perspective on the treatment of mentally ill people is extremely dangerous. i don't care what she says, life is and will always be the answer. 

in totality, it makes sense why a little life was written the way it was, why jude was given such an awful backstory, and why it ended the way it did.

if you take anything away from this review, it's this. do not read this book for your own sanity. yanagihara doesn't deserve your financial support.