‘Torture porn or serious literature?’: the love-hate phenomenon of cult novel A Little Life
One million copies sold, sobbing superfans on TikTok and a new stage adaptation starring James Norton – yet Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 book continues to divides readers
Alex NeedhamSaturday 11 March 2023
On the cover of the American edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is a photograph by the late Peter Hujar. It shows a handsome young man who, with his eyes screwed shut and his head resting on his hand, looks utterly overcome with despair. Look at the small print and you see that the picture is called Orgasmic Man, one of a series Hujar made in 1969. The man isn’t crying. He’s coming.
It’s a remarkably apt image for a book which has hit the commercial motherlode by wallowing in abject misery. Since it was published in 2015, A Little Life has sold more than 1m copies and is now a bona fide cult classic. There are multiple Reddit threads devoted to it; on Pinterest, people show off their A Little Life-inspired tattoos; and the style magazine i-D recently quoted a woman called Kristin Curtis saying that her friends would send each other selfies while sobbing when they reached the novel’s conclusion. On TikTok, the search terms “A Little Life” and “A Little Life book” have 200m page views between them, although not all of the content is positive. “I would not recommend this book to my worst enemy,” declares BookTokker @sivanreads, disapprovingly brandishing her copy, and representing the many readers who were appalled – rather than moved – by this famously divisive text.
Now, a few years after a TV version failed to get off the ground, A Little Life’s superfans can meet in the stalls of the Harold Pinter theatre in London, where a stage adaptation by the celebrated Belgian director Ivo van Hove will land on 25 March. When it was first performed in Amsterdam in 2018, the play was four hours long (not surprising, given that the novel weighs in at 720 pages) and in Dutch. That version was performed with subtitles at the Edinburgh international festival and in New York last year. It has now been condensed somewhat and is in English for the first time, with James Norton, the villain from Happy Valley, playing the tragic central figure, Jude.
A man whose productions often conclude with fluids raining from the ceiling, Van Hove’s take on A Little Life does not stint on the book’s gore – audience members have fainted. “I didn’t see the Dutch production, but friends said that it goes there,” Omari Douglas, who is in the British cast and plays JB, tells me as rehearsals commence. “They don’t pussyfoot around anything, the images are vivid and they’re strong and you see what is described in the novel, done very theatrically of course.”
A Little Life is the story of four men – Jude, JB, Willem and Malcolm – who meet at university, move to New York, and all have improbably stratospheric careers as, respectively, a lawyer, artist, actor and architect. Jude, who is disabled for reasons divulged towards the end of the novel, also self-harms, and through a grisly series of flashbacks, Yanagihara reveals that as a child he suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of evil care workers, a monstrous doctor who took him prisoner, and the countless men who paid to rape him after he was pimped out by the depraved monk Brother Luke. The book juxtaposes Jude’s childhood story with the adult relationships he has with his friends, particularly Willem, and asks whether the love of a chosen family is enough to provide a salve for deep trauma, before concluding – spoiler warning – that it isn’t.
It’s a story that has been deemed so harrowing that the stage production has a psychotherapist on hand in case performing it affects the cast’s mental wellbeing. “I’m really happy that we’ve got that in place because we’re dealing with really sensitive, heavy stuff,” Douglas says. “There’s a preconception that you can just go in and do the thing and shrug it off, [but] there is an element of taking it home with you.”
“We want to make sure that the actors, offstage departments and creatives who have chosen to be part of the production have support available should they feel they need it,” Victoria Abbott, the therapist in question, who works for an organisation called Applause for Thought, tells me in an email. “Furthermore, we aim to provide enough resources about content and themes to allow potential audience members to make an informed decision about whether this production feels suitable for them before viewing a performance.”
Nonetheless, it’s probably the book’s fixation on trauma and abuse that has made it so potent for young readers who are deeply concerned with their identity and mental health, and who feel that the world is a profoundly callous place, with friendship the only bulwark. In its own brutally forceful way, A Little Life has intersected with the fears and obsessions of our times.
“As a fan of the book myself, it was the theme of friendship that resonated most,” Abbott writes. “What Hanya depicts is this gloriously nuanced, beautiful, difficult but meaningful connection between four men. Research shows that one in 20 adults feel lonely ‘often/always’ in England and the theme of never quite feeling like you’ve made those ‘friends for life’ is a familiar one in my therapy room. Perhaps A Little Life reveals that it is possible to create a loving chosen family even amidst adversity.”
But what about the cruelty perpetrated by the book’s myriad evil characters? “For some, the book will reflect trauma and suffering in a way that might validate a reader’s own experience,” Abbot writes. “This is especially poignant considering the rising prevalence of the themes contained in the plot. For instance, the most recent NSPCC statistics estimate that around half a million children experience either neglect, physical, emotional or sexual abuse every year in the UK and approximately 2.4 million people are involved in some kind of domestic violence.”
This is the argument fans deploy against those who feel the book’s treatment of abuse and trauma is schlocky and exploitative. In a discussion about the novel on website the Niche, the writer Peyton Thomas (who claims to read A Little Life every year) says: “Everything that happens to Jude is something that happens to real people,” though Jude’s progress, from a baby abandoned in an alley to a double amputee with an eating disorder, seems more like the life of an early Christian martyr than a living, breathing person. Especially since, in his adult life, he’s a vastly wealthy and successful lawyer – and in his spare time, not just an exquisite singer of Schubert’s lieder but also a professional-grade baker.
A Little Life’s polarising qualities became apparent when the book was reviewed. While the New Yorker acclaimed its “subversive brilliance” and Garth Greenwell, in a much-quoted review for the Atlantic, described it as a great gay novel, it was panned in the LRB, and the New York Review of Books’ criticism provoked a complaint from the novel’s publisher (“What I do object to … is his implication that my author has somehow, to use his word, ‘duped’ its readers into feeling the emotions of pity and terror and sadness and compassion,” wrote Gerald Howard, executive editor of Doubleday).
Despite this ambivalence from literature’s gatekeepers, and the fact that it’s more of an emotional white-knuckle ride than an exemplar of great literary style, A Little Life ended up on the Booker prize shortlist, where it lost to Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. “I think the way it worked is that it’s more like a fairytale or grand opera, it exists in that scale of very heightened emotions,” says critic Sam Leith, who was on the judging panel that year. “It’s like what Noël Coward says about the power of cheap music. I thought it was great but I can’t really explain why.”
While there are nods to Dickens and, in Jude’s name, perhaps to Hardy, “it doesn’t in an obvious way stand in any particular literary tradition, apart from the misery memoir,” Leith says. A Little Life is certainly as gruesomely compelling as a misery memoir, but its true ancestors lie in the world of fanfic, particularly the genre called “hurt/comfort” or “whump”, in which a male character is put through the mill, physically and emotionally, and then given tender solace by a friend, also male.
Usually written by women, this kind of fanfic can be a fantasy of male vulnerability, motivated by BDSM kink, and/or the urge to tear away the facades of masculinity and see the pain and weakness beneath. As in A Little Life, the trauma in hurt/comfort fanfic often takes the shape of sexual violence. “I think sometimes it can feel safer, if you’re a cis woman, if you’re writing about a body that is distinct from your own, and there’s an element of distance there which can be helpful to work through issues and your own thoughts,” says Mikaella Clements, an author and fanfic expert.
Clements recognised the parallels between hurt/comfort fanfic and A Little Life after reading Yanagihara’s book. “The thing I find interesting about hurt/comfort is that the character going through the pain has this really fascinating psychic pull,” she tells me. “In fan fiction you see it happening so often to the more beloved characters within a fandom – for example Bucky from Captain America – and similarly with Jude, I think he’s such a nuanced and real character, and then to watch him go through these extremes is equal parts awful and super-engaging.” This fascination – or identification – with Jude’s suffering is borne out by the unofficial merchandise fans of the book have created for sale on Etsy. As well as a pendant inscribed with the four main characters’ names, and a navy sweatshirt with two hands clasped against a sprig of leaves and a quotation from the book, there is fan art, a typical subject being a despairing Willem visiting a bandaged Jude in hospital and nestling his head in his lap. “I think what’s interesting about the hurt/comfort genre is that it’s this fantasy of pain being recognised,” Clements says. “So you’re the person being hurt, but it’s also the fantasy of getting to tend to a beloved object so you’re the comforter as well. The power balance is quite difficult to track.”
Hysterical tragedy, laced with romance and BDSM? In many other works of literary fiction, these elements may have been employed for darkly comic purposes – but the only irony in A Little Life is the title, given the novel’s great length. Nonetheless, the book’s determination to avoid levity is one reason it compels, Leith suggests. “Part of its force is the way it leans into its subject matter so aggressively,” he says. “It’s like standing in the front row of a Mogwai gig.”
As well as anticipating the hard-pressed Gen Z’s understandable preoccupation with trauma and mental distress, Yanagihara was also prescient in her idiosyncratic treatment of sexual identity. Whether or not A Little Life can be regarded as a gay book depends on who you ask. Interestingly Douglas, who previously starred in It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s Channel 4 saga about a group of gay friends during the Aids crisis, doesn’t regard A Little Life as “a queer story per se”, pointing out that only JB identifies as gay. “There’s a section in the book where Willem says he doesn’t necessarily refer to himself as gay, he just says that he fell in love with Jude,” Douglas says, “and I think those are the kinds of conversations that we’re all having today. If you look at the public discourse about queerness and people putting labels on things, it’s so complex and nuanced.”
The characters’ fuzzily defied sexuality chimes with the modern expansion of the idea of queerness as a state of mind or collection of values, rather than an indication of the people one chooses to sleep with. But it also means that, unlike It’s a Sin, A Little Life doesn’t have to deal with the substance of real gay lives. Jude’s abusers have infected him with a nameless, incurable STD of which he’s deeply ashamed, but if Yanagihara called it Aids, she would have to talk about treatment, and activism, and a wider gay community. Instead, A Little Life takes place in a strange hothouse bubble on which the real world barely impinges. As some critics have pointed out, 9/11 presumably happens at some point in the novel’s timeline, but it goes entirely unmentioned by these four supposed New Yorkers.
As a woman, Yanagihara has taken some heat from those who believe only members of a particular community are qualified to write about its pain, though peers including author Alexander Chee have rushed to her defence: Chee tweeted that in the mid-90s Yanagihara edited an anthology of queer Asian American writing, and that as editor of the New York Times supplement T, “she has given unprecedented mainstream coverage to queer writing and art, showing again and again she is no tourist to our lives”. On the other hand, her use of Orgasmic Man, argues cultural critic Kevin Brazil in his book Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness, is appropriation, an attempt to locate A Little Life in an underground tradition in which it doesn’t fit.Yet where does A Little Life fit? Is it torture porn or serious literature? Fanfic or grand opera? Something to sob over while taking selfies, or merely an airport novel with A-levels? Even people who hate the book usually admit to the weirdly haunting effect of Yanagihara’s netherworld, the kind that makes you want to discuss it with someone else, whether in a book group or on TikTok. In i-D, a fan called Erika Veurink said: “When you match with another person and realise they’re also an A Little Life person, there’s this moment of instant connection. It’s like, if you can tolerate this, then we can cut the bullshit.”
And for all the readers who regard A Little Life as trashy and sensationalist, there are others for whom it validates their own experience of trauma and pain – in the modern parlance, they feel seen. “It’s not a redemption story,” says Clements, “but it kind of is, because you become devoted to Jude. A Little Life is this dream of having people recognise that you have been through something awful, and love and look after you.”
