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Hanya Yanagihara was born in Los Angeles in 1974, but spent much of her childhood in Hawaii, where she attended preparatory school. After graduating from Smith College, Yanagihara moved to New York City and worked in the publishing industry. In 2013, she published her debut novel The People in the Trees, followed quickly by A Little Life, which was published in 2015. Despite its hefty length and dark subject matter, which both Yanagihara and her publishing team assumed would negatively affect the novel’s marketability, the book was both a critical and commercial success.
Yanagihara’s father was an oncologist, and she relates her family’s proximity to the medical field with her interest in disease. Disease is a feature of many of her novels, and is explored heavily in A Little Life, particularly through the character of Jude, who suffers from chronic medical conditions caused by a traumatic childhood injury. Yanagihara remembers that, after she took an interest in art as a child, her father’s pathologist friend would take her to the morgue where she would draw pictures of cadavers. This likely influenced her blunt and composed study of the human body, which is a through-line in her work. Additionally, Yanagihara, who spent her 20s and 30s living and working in NYC, professes a love for the “post-college New York City book” and wanted to give her A Little Life characters a similar experience—although, as the men grow into middle age, the novel transitions away from that particular genre.
Yanagihara has mentioned in interviews that she wrote A Little Life to explore the type of life circumstances that result in unhealable trauma, as well as when it may be appropriate to end one’s life by suicide. She wanted to begin the novel with a character—Jude—who appears healthy, but who by the end of the narrative has descended into a level of disease from which he cannot recover. Additionally, Yanagihara has remarked that she is suspicious of the idea that “life is always the answer,” which, in her estimation, is the prevailing mindset in modern psychology. Yanagihara compares this to the medical field, where it is common practice for doctors to accept that patients may prefer to die rather than seek treatment, and where patients are generally given the autonomy to choose death. Yanagihara notes that the decision to die is not necessarily made because the patient lacks love or purpose in their life, but rather because their suffering is so great that it outweighs their desire for life. The same could be said for Jude. A Little Life asks its readers to consider and perhaps challenge their philosophies and beliefs surrounding suicide, euthanasia, and the rights of a human being to choose death over life.
While Yanagihara has named such writers as Iris Murdoch, Philip Roth, and Anita Brookner as her overarching literary influences, she also notes that A Little Life was inspired by a selection of photographs that she began collecting during her late 20s. These photographs featured references to the AIDS epidemic, young male friend groups, and images of American motel rooms, all of which directly or indirectly relate to the novel’s narrative. When it comes to A Little Life’s literary style and genre, the novel balances contemporary and realist explorations of male friendship and mental health with melodrama of an almost epic scale. The Atlantic critic Garth Greenwell described the novel as “melodrama, sentimental fiction, [and] grand opera,” noting that A Little Life is fittingly influenced by queer aesthetics and is able to elicit deep emotional truths through its heightened, theatrical style.
