A Little Life Study Guide

Hanya Yanagihara was born in 1975 in Los Angeles. She and her family moved frequently, and as a child, she lived in various places throughout the United States, including New York and Hawaii. Her father was a hematologist and oncologist who introduced Yanagihara to the works of Philip Roth, Iris Murdoch, and Barbara Pym. Yanagihara attended high school in Hawaii and went on to graduate from Smith College in 1995. From there, she moved to New York to work as a publicist. During this time, she also worked as a writer and editor for Conde Nast Traveler. She published her first novel, The People in the Trees, in 2013. A Little Life followed in 2015 and was met with much critical success—it was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker prize for fiction, and it was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. Following the success of A Little Life, Yanagihara accepted a position a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, eventually becoming the magazine’s editor-in-chief in 2017. She published her third novel, To Paradise, in 2022.

Curiously, A Little Life contains very few references to pop culture or historical events, making it effectively impossible to situate the novel in a specific point in time. For instance, though much of the plot unfolds in New York, the novel makes no reference to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The effect of this is that the reader can direct all their focus to characters’ emotional states. Leaving out historical reference points also gives the story a timeless and universal quality. There are passing cultural references scattered throughout, however. The last film that Willem Makes, The Happy Days, is about the final years of Rudolf Nureyev, a Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer who famously was the first Soviet artist to defect during the Cold War. Nureyev became and international sensation and one of the greatest male ballet dancers of his generation. He is considered either gay or bisexual (he had heterosexual relationships with women when he was younger). He died of AIDS complications at age 54, less than a decade after testing positive for HIV. He publicly denied his illness for years, though by the late 1980s his health began to decline and his dancing abilities suffered. In this way, Nureyev’s body betrays him as Jude’s does, making him a richly symbolic figure for Yanagihara to include among the book’s scant cultural references. Referencing Nureyev, too, also enables Yanagihara to reference (at least in passing) the AIDS epidemic, which in light of the novel’s numerous gay (or at least, not overtly heterosexual-identifying) main characters and focus on human suffering, seems relevant for her to include. The epidemic was first observed by doctors in the U.S. in 1981, and it disproportionately affected gay and African American men. As of 2018, 700,000 people have died of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. During the height of the epidemic, the LGBTQ community faced additional stigmatization and acts of violence.

Hanya Yanagihara’s two other novels, The People in the Trees and To Paradise, share some common themes with A Little Life. The People in the Trees was inspired by the true story of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. Gajdusek was an American physician, researcher, and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on kuru, a rare and incurable neurodegenerative disorder, who was later convicted of sexually abusing his children. The People in the Trees and A Little Life both grapple with the difficult subject matters of trauma, abuse, and human suffering. To Paradise is set in an alternate version of New York City. The novel consists of three sections, each set 100 years apart on the novel’s alternate timeline (1893, 1993, and 2093). In the New York of the novel’s future, climate change and disease have drastically changed life in the city. Meanwhile, the section set in 1993 takes on the impact of the AIDs crisis on that section’s protagonist, a young gay man with a mysterious, traumatic past. Like A Little Life, To Paradise spends much of its time exploring the depths of human suffering.  Another recent book that offers an unfiltered, dismal glimpse at human suffering is Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce. The novel follows a waitress at an upscale Dallas restaurant who conceals her personal struggles by day but drowns them in a self-destructive wash of drugs, unpleasurable sex, and other forms of degradation by night. A Little Life also shares some similarities with Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov’s infamous novel is narrated (unreliably) by “Humbert Humbert,” (a pseudonym) a loathsome pedophile who gradually becomes obsessed with the 12-year-old daughter of his landlady, Charlotte Haze. After Charlotte’s sudden death, Humbert kidnaps Lolita and travels across the country with her. They stay in motels, and Humbert sexually abuses her. Lolita and A Little Life take on the same difficult subject matter of pedophilia, and the horrific “road trip” on which Brother Luke takes Jude in A Little Life even seems to reference Lolita at certain points.