I cannot remember ever shedding a tear over a novel before, but this one made me do it, more than once even. An astonishing accomplishment, Ms. Yanagihara, who has said in interviews:

"This book adheres to many of the conventions of the classic Western fairy tale: there’s a child in distress, who’s made to face challenges on his own. The era is suggested rather than named. There are no conventional parental figures, in particular mother figures. (Like many fairy tales, I hope this book is defined as much by its absences as its presences.) And yet, unlike a fairy tale, this book concerns itself more with the characters’ emotional response to these challenges and events than the circumstances themselves; I tried to meld the psychological specificity of a naturalistic contemporary novel with the suspended-time quality of a fable. Part of fairy tales’ lasting power is attributable to the fact that they never address their characters’ inner lives (a relatively modern literary concept, that); the particulars of the plot are generally far more important than the characters themselves. With A Little Life, I tried to do the opposite."

"I will just say that there is, in a significant number of these stories [fairy tales]–across cultures, across countries–a stubborn lack of redemption. Sometimes the good child is rewarded, and the bad witch punished, but just as often, they’re not: or what must be endured by the hero or heroine is so terrible, so grotesque, that happiness, usually in the form of marriage or a reunion, seems almost meaningless, an unsatisfying answer to outlandish feats of survival."

"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 do think that men, almost uniformly, no matter their race or cultural affiliations or religion or sexuality, are equipped with a far more limited emotional toolbox. Not endemically, perhaps – but 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 those 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, or 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... As a writer, it’s a great gift–and an interesting challenge–to write about a group of people who are fundamentally limited in this way (and who happen to be half the world’s population)."

"One of the things I wanted to do with this book is create a character who never gets better. And, relatedly, to explore this idea that there is a level of trauma from which a person simply can’t recover. I do believe that really, we can sustain only a finite amount of suffering. That amount varies from person to person and is different, sometimes wildly so, in nature; what might destroy one person may not another. So much of this book is about Jude’s hopefulness, his attempt to heal himself, and I hope that the narrative’s momentum and suspense comes from the reader’s growing recognition — and Jude’s — that he’s too damaged to ever truly be repaired, and that there’s a single inevitable ending for him." ( )

I think I would have loved this book if it were shorter. I'm not adverse to long books (in fact, I've declared 2024 the YOBB, or Year of Big Books in an attempt to get some weightier reads off my shelves). This book could have been great, but it went on so long I got bored and/or frustrated. I became so sick of Jude's and Willem's relationship where they constantly seemed to be apologizing for failing to understand the other. I started to think that Jude's backstory had just too many traumatic events and evil people in it. I even started to wonder what all the other characters saw in Jude anyway.

Given the strong characters and heart-wrenching plot, I shouldn't have had these thoughts. But things dragged on. I still liked it, but didn't find it great. ( )

The characters in this moving book will stay with me for a long time, not just Jude St. Francis, but those in his orbit as well: Willem Ragnarsson, Jean Batpiste “JB” Marion, Malcolm Irvine, Harold Stein, Julia Altman, Andy, Richard. While we know immediately this is no ordinary coming of age story, the general framework is just that. For several decades, we follow the lives of four gifted young men who met in college in Boston, went to separate grad schools, and all wound up in New York City as they each achieve success in their careers. But, at the center, we come to know Jude most—the one who those who love him know so little about. It is not an easy book, peeling away the layers of horrifying traumas Jude endured as a child. Heart-wrenching, devastating, outrageous, disturbing, but deftly and beautifully written. I thought it dragged a bit in the last quarter of the book (711 pages) and sometimes the metaphors missed the mark, but overall, unflinchingly powerful. ( )

Book club choice. Epic read. Thoughtful and harrowing. 4 friends meet at college aged about 17. Main character is Jude, whose life has been a nightmare of abuse from birth. As an adult he is a very successful lawyer, but ruined by having been told he is worthless through childhood. Some things do go well for him in adult life, most importantly his relationship with Willem, but the end is tragedy. I had hoped for a happy ending, but this is more authentic given his history. A difficult emotional rollercoaster of a read. ( )

This is hands-down one of my favorite books. While heart-wrenching and, at times, difficult to stomach, it possesses so much rawness and beauty in its writing. The descriptions, the style of writing, and the depth of the characters kept me coming back. However, this is one of the few books from which I needed a break. I found myself reading a couple of chapters and then needing to wait a week to continue. The content is disturbing, raw, real, and crude ( )