I first read A Little Life in 2021. It was in the middle of writing my (master’s) thesis, and I distinctly remember sitting on my bed in student accommodation, and sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. When I decided to re-read it, I had two objectives: 1) To make a note of all the lovely quotes and bits of writing I remember reading; 2) To figure out to what extent was my sadness and heartbreak a result of my personal circumstances (and mental health), and to what extent was it actual story.
There definitely is depth of emotion in this book; but I found that a lot of the horror came from shock. In a way, it was similar to the first time I read A Game of Thrones where I was shocked and was in utter disbelief that Ned Stark dies; that is not how I had been conditioned on how books work. Similarly, I think a lot of the horrors of what Jude went through as a child went on for pages and pages and pages in my head; in reality, they were not as elaborately described but they were so much more horrifying. However, I refuse to define the life of Jude St. Francis by what happened to him before he was 15. It obviously changed and shaped his life. Jude St. Francis, though, was so much more. He goes through hell, of course, but I was crying more at how much love he found in his adult life. At the genuine friendships and relationships that filled his life, a kind of love and acceptance we all certainly yearn for. That is what allowed me to finish the book then, that is what compelled me this time around too.
I found myself thinking more about JB’s life, about Malcom, and about Willem. I found myself reflecting on Harold and Andy. (And the lack of key female characters.) Almost all reviews of this book talk only of Jude, but the other characters in this were full and deep characters. It was a hell of a cast.
Make no mistake, the book is an exhausting read. Yanigahara wrings you out until there is barely anything left. She does it through a non-linear story telling, through a matter-of-fact tone, which I found to be so much worse than had we got a more mainstream narrative style. As she said in a Guardian interview: “I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high. I wanted it to feel a little bit vulgar in places. Or to be always walking that line between out and out sentimentality and the boundaries of good taste. I wanted the reader to really press up against that as much as possible and if I tipped into it in a couple of places, well, I couldn’t really stop it.”
This is definitely not a book to be read if your heart is not 100% warm and content. I don’t recommend anyone read it, but I will not deny this is still one of my favourite books.
Some of my favourite quotes below, in no particular order:
“All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.”
“He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.”
“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”
“He had experienced everything he had probably never dreamed he would have as a younger man, and he was still young enough to enjoy it all: money and renown and artistic freedom. Love. Friendship.”
“He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults.”
Minoli Wijetunga 