A Little Life Audiobook

I slept with this book after I read it. I kid you not: I held its bulking, hardcover bound 700 pages in my arms as I fell asleep amid a raging storm. I refused to let A Little Life leave me. Its brilliant writing, its broken characters, and its bleak, unforgiving story dug into my heart, into the very pores of my skin. As a twenty-year-old, I felt both so young and so old upon finishing this novel, as if its sheer humanity aged my soul while making me appreciate all the years I still have left.

A Little Life follows four friends after they graduate from a small, prestigious Massachusetts college: Willem, a kind and talented actor; JB, a sharp and sometimes-caustic artist, Malcolm, an aspiring architect at a well-known firm; and Jude, a mysterious and intelligent litigator. What looks like an average bildungsroman turns into an intense and tragic tale when we learn about enigmatic Jude’s backstory. Abandoned at a monastery at birth, he endured a childhood of severe physical and emotional abuse, followed by several years of sexual abuse, forced prostitution, and psychological trauma. The book soon hones in on Jude’s struggle to free himself from the demons of his past, the hyenas that howl and drown out the voices of his closest, most beloved friends.

This book is relentlessly sad and exquisitely written. Hanya Yanagihara spares us no mercy when revealing Jude’s trauma. She details both his past abuse and his present self-harm with explicit specificity, her diction so precise and piercing it made me shake, and at times, sob. Yanagihara writes both Jude’s suffering and his friendships with a keen eye. She captures the nuances of human emotion, physical space, and change over time with eloquence and heart. She writes about some of the most wretched, abominable acts of cruelty I have ever read without sentimentalizing any of the abuse or making any of the characters’ feelings mawkish.

Yanagihara offers us temporary respite from the pain within Jude’s past by showing us the power of friendship. A Little Life’s most affective moments come not from its graphic depictions of violence, but from its quiet, uplifting portrayals of compassion. While the many abusive men in Jude’s earlier life show us the depth of human atrocity, Jude’s tender, bittersweet relationships with Willem, Harold, Andy, and others offer to us mankind’s capacity for kindness. All of these complex characters make mistakes, and through their imperfections shines their humanness.

Please keep in mind: A Little Life is ruthlessly depressing. In the end, Jude really receives no reprieve from his anguish. As someone who has suffered his own abuse – a version less intense than Jude’s, yet still real – and as someone who reads a lot about abuse, I appreciated Yanagihara’s dedication to showing the darker side of reality. Trauma is trauma is trauma. And while we can all fight for recovery, sometimes that absolvement may never come. Sometimes, we just have to act with whatever kindness we have left and hope that it brings even a moment of light into the dark.

Highly recommended to anyone who wants their heart both filled and destroyed. Set aside some quality time for A Little Life. It will consume you.

I can’t, with a clear conscience, give this book anything less than 5 stars. It’s a book that kept me reading long into the night, made me turn each page with vigor and curiosity, gave me chills and shivers over the joys and sorrows of each character, and ultimately left me feeling a bit older and tortured and yet at peace with the deeply complicated nature of humanity.

What Hanya Yanagihara does with A Little Life is nothing nearly as pretentious as that paragraph above. Somehow in 720 pages, she manages to adequately–better yet, excellently–show and make the reader experiences the lives of these young men. The novel follows four boys who meet at college: Malcolm, JB, Willem, and the central and mysterious figure, Jude. It’s truly Jude’s tale, but Yanagihara ends up telling each and every one of the boys’ stories with ease and genuineness that makes them real.

Her prose is clean and honest and revealing of the many emotions that humans experience. It’s never explicitly beautiful, not flowery or overwrought with adjectives or descriptors. But it has its own beauty that comes from its ability to convey these feelings, making you feel every pain or happiness that Malcolm and JB and Willem and Jude feel. It’s some of the best prose I’ve read in a while (or ever read), and I wanted it to keep going on forever.

There’s so much more I could say about this book. About how it hurt me to read at times–because yes, there is very graphic material (i.e. self-harm, physical, sexual and psychological abuse, drug use) that makes the reading cringeworthy in parts–about how I fell in love with so many wonderful people in this story, about how I learned empathy and sorrow and frustration and anger for and with each of them, and how if I were to write a book I would want it to have the essence of this one.

The truth is, though, I can’t recommend this book to people, not without knowing them very well. Because it’s a difficult journey that I can’t suggest everyone take. Don’t take this book lightly. But if you do choose to read it, if you choose to flip to that first page, be prepared for something inexplicable and jarring, but resilient and beautiful and ultimately worthwhile.

If you want to find yourself sobbing late at night for characters you grow so attached to and have to put down the book for a while… this is it.

It’s been a very long time since a book utterly broke me.

Beautifully written character driven book (see I like them sometimes!) about our friends meeting in university in New York. It’s about their lives, their careers, their friendships, their high points but mostly their low ones.

Trigger warnings for… everything.

i have died a hundred deaths and shed a thousand tears whilst reading this book. it feels as if i have never truly known grief until this moment. how does one recover from such heartbreak?

i am at a complete loss, in a devastatingly beautiful way; but how comforting it is to know that a story about a little life has become such a significant part of mine.

A Little Life is a powerful, disturbing novel. It’s full of pain, desperation, and a sense of isolating sadness that sucks the reader into some very dark places. It’s also the best book I’ve read in years.

Reading the blurb, you’ll get the idea that this work is about 4 college friends and their lives, but that’s not entirely true. While each of the 4 main characters, and in fact all the characters in the book, are fully realized with extraordinary character development, the book is really about just one man, Jude St. Francis.

Jude is a truly broken person; he’s been broken by a childhood that is both a series of horrors that are difficult to read about and a testament to what a human being can endure. Jude doesn’t come out of his childhood whole and I feel a little broken by having read about his life. I also feel that strange happiness that comes from being emotionally purged in the way that only great books can accomplish.

As Alona mentioned in her review, this is not a romance, but it is a love story. It’s a love story about friendship that tries to overcome pain, and the bravery and sacrifice that true friendship and love sometimes require. The romance in this book is a beautiful one, but not in the traditional sense that a reader might expect or want for the characters involved.

We all often say that we loved this character or that character in one of the many books that we read, I know I say it often, but the character of Jude St. Francis is something special. I loved Jude more than I’ve loved any character before; that’s probably why he was capable of so thoroughly breaking my heart. I wanted so much for him, I wanted him to be so much and get so much in life. He didn’t get all that I wanted for him, but in the end, I was satisfied with where he ended up and it seemed fitting and very real.

I hate the term “triggers”, but it’s appropriate here. I have a few triggers of my own and they were part of this book, but I felt the writing here just brought me into those places that I don’t like to go and left me, not upset or feeling traumatized, but more appreciative of my own ability to survive and thrive. I wanted to reach into the book and take Jude’s hand and tell him we’d get through it together.

This book is definitely not for everyone, but if you’re up to it, you’ll be thrilled by the writing. There’s pain here, and beauty along with it.

Big thanks to Alona for the many messages we exchanged while reading this. It sounds silly, but I feel as if the two of us have survived something together.