A Little Life, which she wrote while an editor at large at Condé Nast Traveler, took only 18 months. The People in the Trees took Yanagihara 18 years to write, off and on, during which time she worked as a publicist, book editor, and magazine writer. That book featured homosexuality and pedophilia not until A Little Life would these be revealed as consistent preoccupations.
(She has called the last “the closest thing that Asian Americans have to Harlem.”) Her first novel, The People in the Trees, about a doctor who discovers immortality on an island paradise, was well but quietly received in 2013. She has lived in Manhattan since her 20s, but her heart is in Tokyo and Hawaii. The author was born in Los Angeles to a third-generation Hawaiian Japanese father and a Seoul-born Korean mother her father, a hematologist-oncologist, moved the family around the country for work. (A rare pan in The New York Review of Books prompted an indignant letter from Yanagihara’s editor.) A Little Life would go on to win the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize it has since been adapted for the stage by the celebrated director Ivo van Hove, and last month, readers of the New York Times nominated it next to finalists like Beloved and 1984 for best book of the past 125 years.īut Yanagihara’s motivations remained mysterious.
Critics lavished praise on the book, with one declaring it the long-awaited “great gay novel” for its unsparing approach to Jude, who falls in love with his male best friend. The novel, the second from author Hanya Yanagihara, begins as a light chronicle of male friendship among four college graduates in New York City before narrowing its focus to Jude, a corporate litigator whose decades-long struggle to repress a childhood of unrelenting torments - he was raised by pedophiles in a monastery, kidnapped and prostituted in motels, molested by counselors at an orphanage, kidnapped again, tortured, raped, starved, and run over with a car - ends in his suicide.Īn unlikely beach read with a gothic riptide, A Little Life became a massive best seller in 2015. By the time you finish reading A Little Life, you will have spent a whole book waiting for a man to kill himself.
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