Our Rating
★★★★
When a friend recommended that I read Hanya Yanighara’s deceptively-titled A Little Life he wished me luck and told me to “enjoy the torture you’re about to experience”.
When I finished the book a month later his response was “Omgggg you survived. How do you feel?”, and despite the incredibly heavy (and not at all “little"!) premise, its heartbreaking and – at times – distressing content, I felt like it was one of the most articulate and impactful stories I’ve read in a very long time, and I was grateful for his recommendation.
On the surface, A Little Life tells the story of four highly-ambitious college friends who, after graduating, move to New York to start their chosen careers. There’s Willem the aspiring actor; JB, the aspiring artist; Malcolm the aspiring architect, and Jude the aspiring lawyer. While each of these characters face their own unique challenges and obstacles in realising their dream futures, it soon becomes clear, however, that it is in fact the dreams themselves (or perhaps more accurately the nightmares) of Jude’s past that prove the most difficult for all of them to confront and overcome.
At a time when rates of mental illness are at a record high, when men account for more than 75% of suicides annually and the act of supporting someone with a mental illness is often glibly reduced down to simply asking “R U OK?, Hanya Yanighara’s A Little Life tells a story that no one seems prepared to tell. A story that is much darker and therefore perhaps far closer to reality. One that doesn’t resolve itself simply and easily, but instead tells a complicated tale of a friend in crisis and the way in which those around him struggle to rise to the challenge they face, feeling ill-equipped, unprepared and unsure of what to do in response.
“Both helpless, and paradoxically, more determined to help”
One of the first images we get in A Little Life captures this idea perfectly as Jude, physically and mentally scarred by years of childhood abuse and trauma, suffers from an episode of severe pain as his best-friend Willem watches on, feeling “both helpless and, paradoxically, more determined to help”.
As a result of Jude’s desire to separate himself from an unthinkable past, Jude’s friends learn – begrudgingly - to accept his secrecy, with “the first fifteen years of his life remaining unsaid and unspoken, as if they had never happened at all, as if he had been removed from the manufacturer’s box when he reached college, and a switch at the base of his neck had been flipped, and he had shuddered to life.” This is just “part of the deal when you were friends with Jude” we are told, ‘they all knew it. You let things slide that your instincts told you not to, proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again.”
But as things turn from bad to worse, Jude’s friends are forced to grapple with the question
“What is more important in a friendship, to respect one’s privacy and independence, or the need to help a friend?”
As Willem tells us,“Everything Jude communicates to [his friends] indicated that he didn’t want to be helped. And yet he couldn’t accept that. The question was how you ignored someone’s request to be left alone – even if it meant jeopardising the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won’t be helped without realizing that if you don’t try to help, then you’re not being a friend at all? Talk to me, he sometimes wanted to shout at Jude. Tell me things. Tell me what I need to do to make you talk to me.”
In a recent interview, Hanya Yanighara claimed that she wished to explore in A Little Life the notion that “men, almost uniformly, no matter their race or cultural affiliations or religion or sexuality, are equipped with a far more limited emotional toolbox” than women. According to Yanighara, “there’s no society that I know of that encourages men to put words to the sort of feelings – much less encourages their expression of these feelings – that women get to take for granted. Maybe this is changing with younger men, but I sometimes listen to my male friends talk, and can understand that what they’re trying to communicate is fear, shame, or vulnerability – even as I find it striking that they’re not even able to name those emotions, never mind discuss their specificities; they talk in contours, but not in depth.” In A Little Life it’s no different. Yanighara says that
““these men’s friendships, while close by anyone’s definition, are still built upon a mutual desire to not know too much””
And, as a consequence, Jude’s friends suffer from an inability to have the tough conversations when they need to happen. As interviewer Adalena Kavanagh writes, “there are moments in the book when characters wonder if they had only pushed a little harder, if they had just asked the right questions, they could have helped Jude”.”The reader [too] can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if [Jude] had been psychologically-helped - or more accepting of help - earlier.”
Yanighara seems to suggest that it is men’s “limited emotional toolbox” that prevents Jude from getting the help he needs, but A Little Life left me wondering whether anyone - male or female - truly is equipped to handle such tough conversations and, when faced with the challenge of helping a friend in crisis, does anyone really know what they should (and would) do in response?
It is books like A Little Life that force us to confront and ask ourselves these important questions. That give us a glimpse into a world that we may prefer not to look into (let alone inhabit), but may better equip us to understand and help those who are suffering in silence.