Reflections on A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara

TW // Trauma, self-harm, mental illness ----- There is a difference between seeing someone actively trying to destroy themselves right in front of your eyes when you are sixteen years old and not knowing what to do about it, or how to stop it, and quite genuinely not being able to understand, and ten years later finding out there is a book that has been written (curiously, ten years ago) on how universal, how known, how binding, albeit difficult, that particular experience is, regardless of whether you are the destroyer or the one watching the destroyer destroy themselves. 

I finished reading A Little Life while tucked into an obscure corner in the middle of Don Mueang airport in Bangkok two nights ago, in the seven hours that I had to spend there while waiting in between flights. I don’t think there’s been a book that has evinced such a raw, visceral reaction out of me in a very long while – not in a while I can remember, most certainly. I can name books that have made me tear up and books that I have hated and books I have not managed to read past ten pages, I can name books that I liked better on second reading and books that exposed me to brilliant minds and brilliant styles and brilliant times; books that have shown me that despite how extraordinarily difficult yet extraordinarily easy our lives are, despite how singular they seem, how distinct and particular we try to make ourselves, we are still bound together, still confined, still blossom together in ways and experiences that are universal, that are felt by us all, across times and eras and places and lives and immediate worlds simply because we are human. And yes, disparities exist. Yes, we try to be different. Yes, we rebel and simultaneously try to fit in. These are aspects of human existence that resonate across the world, across cultures. What also resonates, stays, remains unwavering is the human capacity to endure pain, to sustain through loss and grief and heartbreak, to try to heal itself, to descend into madness, across our mind and our body – the human nature itself is a varied cosmos, thoughts and stars that cannot be fathomed into constellations, landscapes that despite all advancements in science and technology cannot be traversed and chartered entirely. What, then, is the very condition of human life, the life we try to lead, the life we tell ourselves we can lead, the life we make for ourselves, our own little lives, your little life, my little life – in all of this, the pain, the sadness, the abject horror of it all; what is the significance of this little life? How do we live it? Do we, at all?

All this, and more, swirled through my head as I steadily ploughed through that tombstone of a novel; ironically enough, a Valentine’s gift from my boyfriend earlier this year when he had asked me to name a book I had never read but had always wanted to. Back in February, I had only heard that A Little Life was a tremendous novel; I had heard that it was soul-crushing and introspective, but I knew nothing of the story itself. It had been on my TBR for years, and my boyfriend, sweetheart that he is, had managed to weasel that information out of me, and there I was, clutching a copy and plodding my way through the lives of Jude and Willem, JB and Malcolm. All such insanely human characters, with flaws and feelings, emotions and sentiments, ups and downs – today, as I write this, I still feel them under my skin, at the tips of my fingers as they move across my keyboard. Brilliant Jude, gentle Willem. Poor Harold. Poor, poor reader.

When I was in high school, my best friend was a girl who later started to harm herself a lot. We were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen; I, for one, was barely able to understand what made her do it – I am not proud of how I handled it back then, but in my defense, I was young, practically still a child, and ignorant, and trying to keep myself afloat in the unrelenting sea of the severe Indian education system, and, frankly, I wasn't equipped enough to deal with it. When you are an adolescent, the one thing that scares you to no end is seeing your friends hurt, and here my best friend was, dragging razors across her arms, crying at the sight of the blood, calling me in a panic and making my stomach plummet into the depths of hell every so often. I’ve never spoken of those years to anyone, not really, and my mind has suppressed much of it, so there are lots of things I don’t remember. What I do remember is the irrational fear whenever I saw her in school, whenever she would text or call, whenever she said my name – her parents weren’t really around, so I took it upon myself to make sure we were both growing up together. Things were difficult for her, and I wasn't able to understand; when the self-harm got too much, and she started practically cutting herself to ribbons, I decided it was too difficult for me to put up with. And as I said, I'm not proud of how I handled it. If this sort of situation were to happen now, perhaps I would be able to deal with it better. Perhaps I would be able to guide my friend better. Perhaps I would have encouraged therapy, counselling, conversations with people who were medically knowledgeable enough to help, and perhaps I wouldn’t have walked away from someone who clearly needed the kind touch of friendship at a time when they were at their most vulnerable. But back then, all I had was an insane terror that something would go wrong again, that my friend would start cutting herself at unannounced moments, that I wouldn't be able to tell anyone and that I wouldn't be able to make it stop. Today, if I were to be honest with myself, the thought of it still makes me afraid, and I am frightened by it a great deal. But I have learned from that time, now buried in the past, and those years have been shut up in my mind for the last many years, which made reading A Little Life that much more painful, that much more difficult. I wasn’t ready for the memories to resurface, I wasn’t ready to relive those times. I wasn’t ready to see how Willem did, in the course of the story, exactly what I had tried to do for my friend, and I wasn’t ready to accept that both he and I failed miserably.

The most enigmatic thing about Jude is that he is not your average protagonist. He is by far the most damaged character I have ever read, and I don't mean this just physically. Throughout literature, throughout fiction, the trope (reflection?) of the suffering and the sufferer has held greater reader inclination as compared to the protagonist who has had beauty, wealth and power in the clasp of his hand. Frankenstein’s monster. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Lucy Snowe, Moll Flanders, Hamlet, Oedipus, Gregor Samsa, the narrator of White Nights. Closer home to me, Devdas and Paro, Srikanto and Rajlakshmi, Apu and Durga, Charu, Subarnalata, Maitreyi Devi in Na Hanyate. These are all characters that suffer, and greatly. I do not proclaim to have read every single book in existence, but I have read a fair share of pain, and yet nothing I have read comes close to what Jude St Francis suffers, a suffering so great, so profound, and when the reader meets him, inflicted so entirely upon himself via memories and scars of his past, that the the true story of it, well into the latter part of the book when we do read it, is almost too much to bear. 

“Trauma porn” seems to be a recurrent phrase in reviews that I have come across online of A Little Life. Extended suffering, unrelenting misery, an agony that has no end. Jude undergoes massive transformation, most of which happens at the very crucible of his suffering and dictates the rest of his life. All his pain is confined to the first fifteen years of his existence, and for the rest, all he does is cast himself about, barely afloat – and in the end, drowning – in memories that flood his consciousness, flashbacks from and remnants of his “unclean” life that he cannot escape, that he compares to a pack of hyenas chasing him through a dense, eternal savannah. The novel is a long, unending commentary on the very unending nature itself of trauma, trauma that remains after years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, of the kind that sees no salvation and knows it will know no respite. The mental pain that Jude goes through is described in very graphic terms and the book is, in many cases, very triggering and bleak, but A Little Life is also one of the most beautiful commentaries I have read on the nature of friendship, of love, of human endurance. I suppose the whole story can be described, in very layman terms, as a statement of what the body and the mind and the heart are capable of doing, of enduring, of bearing, independent of each other. Jude suffers because his body and his mind suffer. Willem suffers because he loves Jude, because his heart holds such an extraordinary quality of space for him that without Jude he is barely just a person, akin to what Jude is and becomes without him. Harold suffers because he loves Jude, and because he loses both his sons. The narrative power of A Little Life is remarkable, and I don't think I have the words to describe it. It is both unbearable and unputdownable, both grotesque in its depictions of suffering and sublime in its insistence on the endurance of love, and it drags one into it until one is exhausted and bleeding from its impact yet utterly unable to look away. Only a truly powerful writer can make one feel this way – the novel was nominated for the Booker Prize but never won, but in no way is its impact, its ability to touch human life, any lesser. 

For me, reading the novel in the liminal space of an airport, surrounded by strangers and fluorescent lights, the book and its reading were transformative, not only because of its subject matter but also because it reminded me so much of my own life. Having a friend and being unable to save them from themselves despite trying your best. Pain and misery, optimism and hope despite the awful, awful fates that meet both Jude and Willem. Reflections of/on life, desperate and deep and dauntless all at the same time. The story dredged up memories I had long buried, memories of helplessness, of watching someone I loved unravel before my eyes, of them falling apart, and of my own inadequacy, of failing them in ways I did not understand until much later. Jude’s story is not my friend’s story, nor mine, nor yours, and yet it is all of ours, all at the same time. And when I closed the book, I thought of how much it is a story of how friendship can be both balm and burden, how love can be both redemptive and ruinous, salvation and futility. It is the story of how we, as people, carry each other, and how sometimes carrying is not enough – the human condition in its most fragile, most unrelenting form. And of course, there are no easy answers. Only the echo of its title, which is both diminutive and infinite: this little life, which is ours to endure, ours to squander, ours to cherish, ours to lose.

I often think of how literature, at its most devastating, is more than simply recounting stories. It is about telling us our story – your story, my story, your little life, my little life – whether we are ready to hear it or not, and perhaps the significance of this little life lies not in its triumphs or its tragedies, but in its telling. In the act of bearing witness, in the act of remembering. In the act of saying, however haltingly, however painfully, that this life was lived, that it mattered. And perhaps that is what will stay, what will remain, long after we are all gone.