A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (No Spoilers)

I have never before felt such relief after finishing a book.

By the end, at the dénouement, I physically felt a weight being lifted off of me, and I almost, almost - inappropriately - cheered. I was so relieved that I actually laughed for one second. I should say that I resent all the people who said that the last hundred pages of the book are the saddest. No, they're not. At least to me, they were not. I acquiesce to it being an individual experience, but the hype about the last 100 pages made me sit so on edge while I entered that phase of reading that it robbed me of the fullest experience of it, because I was perpetually afraid of what I might read. I am here to tell you that it's okay. After The Axiom of Equality chapter, nothing you read will be as bad - at least in terms of graphic depictions.

Speaking of, Yanagihara's writing is phenomenal. I have never in my little life read anything this painfully beautiful, words this intricately woven, ideas this ingeniously put together, describing life in such an accurate way that it resonates every single time and yet in ways that you would never have thought of describing life. Reading this book has made me age at least fifty years in spirit, in thought, and that is the greatest yet most painful gift a writer can give you. To experience an entire life, to understand life for what it is, in all its absurdity and pain. There is so much more to this book than the unbearable trauma it presents to you. There is a guide. On friendship, on life, how to live, how not to, how it can't be helped, how to love, and how not to, and how the way in which love comes from someone cannot be helped either, how life comes at you, how the inevitability of it is so often unfair and yet just that - inevitable, for reasons that elude even the starkest of minds. 

I have read and listened to quite a few reviews about this book, and so many people have said that trauma is exploited in the book just to make it hurt more for the reader. In my most personal and humble opinion, I think that's just completely missing the point of this book. Some say A Little Life is a work is fiction, some say it's based on real events. But after some research, discussion and evaluation of the way things are written and the course of events, where one chaos leads so cleanly to another chaos, I personally lean on the former, and not really because I want to believe that it's a work of fiction. I think that the lives of many people in this world are utterly horrendous and unjust to the human eye, and the types of nightmares lived by Jude, albeit not as exact, are/have also been lived by many people. These scenes are not inconceivable to a degree where you can say "oh, this would never happen in real life" because that's just ignorant denial. The probability that the most horrible thing you can imagine a human being doing to another human being has actually happened, or is actually happening somewhere in the world, is significant. Murphy's Law. So, to say that this book is merely exploitative of trauma for the sake of it is being a deliberate, absolute idiot. Even if Yanagihara herself were to assert that this book of hers were a mindless game to toy with people and the subject of trauma, I would still stand by what I said. 

Also addressing the trauma that is portrayed in the book - it is definitely not something negligible, but I won't dwell on it in this review. To do so would be to undertake a responsibility I am not ready for. If you are to pick up this book, and you have triggers, then read the trigger warnings. If you are sensitive and deeply empathic, suicidal, depressed, anxious, or anything of the sort, avoid it. I picked it up refusing to read anything about it, even the trigger warnings, to challenge myself or to prove to the world that I do not faze at what so easily scars others, and I closed the last page with a new sense of self, with humility, with thoughts to last a lifetime. It is a painful path to read A Little Life, and the less thoughtlessly you undertake that path, the better you will come out at the end. 

And if you do feel ready to read it, then I'll tell you what I wish I had been told instead of what was said to me. You will seldom get a moment of respite from the pain, or the life lessons, but after The Axiom of Equality, though it doesn't exactly get better, and though it is not by any means a happy ending, you won't have to go through the kind of pain of reading what you have read there. The tides are softer, less shockingly egregious, though perhaps only because we have been made more resilient through witnessing the most horrendous part of Jude's life, and not because what ensues is actually better. But if you have read reviews, even this one, don't, for the life of yours, let it make you afraid of that which you do not yet know. Because if you let fear grip you before reading, you won't appreciate the lessons in the way you were meant to appreciate them, and this book, is above all, or among other things, one of the things you really need to think about in this life. 

One of the many quotes I have highlighted and marked, picked at random by opening the book at a randomly marked page:

'...to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable.'