Month: June 2019

Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, A Little Life, follows the lives of four young men as they experience the trials and rewards that come with the various stages of adulthood. Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB have been best friends since their freshman year of college. This forges an intimate bond, no matter the struggles they face together or apart. In this chronological multi-perspective novel, Yanagihara supplements the backstories of these four main characters in order to provide a better understanding of the characters’ individual pasts before meeting each other. These backstories also show how their pasts influence the types of people they become decades later. Heavy themes of early childhood trauma, self-deprecation, and self-mutilation coincide with the novel’s emphasis on everlasting friendship and the various definitions of love.