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“…things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”

Release Date: March 10th, 2015

Genre(s): Adult fiction, literary fiction, contemporary, LGBT

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 816

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

Synopsis

A Little Life follows four college classmates who move to New York. Over time they navigate complexities and their own relationships, but they find that Jude has been struggling and continues to suffer, defined by the unspeakable traumas that defined his childhood and his adult life.

Review

A Little Life is the kind of book that you really need to read at the right time to fully absorb all of its contents. Which sounds like every book at the surface, but there’s more to it than just that with this book. Length aside, there is just so much about this book that makes me so glad that I took the amount of time with this book that I did. And considering the amount of graphic content in this book, that time included taking some breaks while reading to fully process the extent of the pain these characters faced. It’s also a book that, if you’re like me, will likely reflect on for a long time after reading. It’s been a week since completing the book and I’m still having some difficulty moving on from it.

Ever since I’ve noticed this book going around on social media, all I heard from fellow readers was how incredibly sad this book was. And from that alone, I didn’t know what to expect. That combined with the rather vague synopsis didn’t give me a lot to go off of, and for the most part, I think that makes sense for the story that’s told.

With a book of this size and depth, there are so many themes that can be discussed endlessly. But one of the themes I was most invested in was the treatment of mental health and how this was demonstrated through different perspectives. I found A Little Life to be the perfect example of how to show, not tell. There are several instances where characters make major mistakes in how to support Jude’s mental health and the issues that he’s facing. After seeing the world through Jude’s lens, and then seeing the mistakes made through another characters’ lens, you can immediately see their wrongdoings without it being directly explained, and it’s writing like that that I found to be so well-done throughout this book. There are similar situations regarding Jude’s disability throughout A Little Life in regards to the ways that his friends approach the topic towards the beginning of the book. These character’s dialogues and decision-making led to so much cause and effect for each of them as well and getting to explore those dynamics throughout the book did so much not only for the story, but also for the greater conversations about topics like inclusion and treatment. There’s so much that’s explored in this book without having to say it directly, and I felt like there was a lot of power in that.

Another theme of A Little Life featured the power of lifelong friends and relationships. While I’m not sure about the possibilities of every single one of these characters staying in touch as well as they did throughout the years, I really liked that this was explored over such a long period of time. While there was a romantic relationship in this, I really liked that this book also explored the power of platonic love, especially in the long term. I feel that this is something that we see less often in both books and our society, so seeing this closeness explored among the characters over the years was something I was glad to read about and see as a focal point of the story as a whole.

Despite all of the above, I can’t necessarily recommend A Little Life to everyone. The content in this book can be very heavy and graphic at times, and is quite frequent throughout the book. This is definitely one I’d only read if you’re in the right headspace to do so, and heed to any content warnings if you need to do so. I personally put this book off until I was in the proper headspace to read it; otherwise, I don’t think I would have been able to complete it.

A Little Life is a book that’s been on my TBR for quite some time and after reading it, despite its heavy topics, I’m glad to have read it and be able to continue the discussion with the many others who have also read this book. While I had some questions here and there, I love Yanagihara’s writing and how it managed to convey so much without having to be direct or tell the reader. Again, the content of this book is heavy in more ways than one so it’s definitely going to be a different reading experience for many readers. But for me personally, the experience I had while reading this book, while absolutely heartbreaking and difficult through much of it, was well worth it.