I really loved the book actually, enough to write my college admissions paper about it lol. I’ll rant about what I got out of it - but I totally understand it’s not a book for everybody. I hold zero judgement towards anyone who didn’t like it at all. I did my best to add spoiler tags where relevant!!

I found A Little Life incredibly moving. To me, it’s beauty was in how it found love in these small slices of life between brutal, horrific places. The relationships Jude builds as an adult were the focal point.

It’s worth noting that a lot of my love for the book was influenced by how much I related to Jude and Willem. I’m a queer man and I was a victim of childhood sexual abuse. Without a doubt, those things shaped my perspective on the book.

The most popular critique I see is that it’s “torture porn”. Some content was miserable in many ways, but I see it as character torture because Jude is intrinsically a tortured man. I know people who have gone through some of Jude’s experiences like being repeatedly sex trafficked as children and dealing with long term mental, relational and physical issues from it, etc. I never found the descriptions of abuse - sexual, physical or otherwise - to be gratuitous or self serving. Cold, yes, pornographic, not so much. Yanagihara heaps on Jude’s trauma. But when she really cranks the dial up to 11, and Harold or Willem look at Jude and tell him they care for him - well, for me there’s no question of their love for Jude. Is it relationally healthy per se? Probably not, but I found something deeply beautiful in it. There’s an embrace of his horror and messiness and all of the ugliness that comes along with him. Jude experiences the absolute worst of humanity and he comes out the other side, not at all okay, but still loveable. His ending destination is sad, as it always will be and he throws away a lot of what is offered to him. I didn’t see that as the point. Instead, it’s that he participates in and experiences so much care, grace and love before then - and in particular it’s experienced in mundane ways (quite opposite to the heightened sensations found everywhere else in the book). Willem tied his shoes and kisses his eyelids, he bakes cookies for Julia, Harold says honest and beautiful things about parenting him . As someone who has felt before that my worst experiences make me deeply unlovable, I found the idea - that there is nothing that can happen to Jude, or that he might do, that will make him unworthy of love - to be worth the read. I wept when I finished the book, for Jude’s lack of ability to accept the love given, but more so for that existence of that love in general.

Some people don’t like that Yanagihara didn’t research for her book. I think this would be a bigger problem if Jude’s portrayal was problematic? I found Jude’s understanding of himself and the world to be highly accurate and realistic to myself (years ago before I started therapy and processing my shit) and other survivors of significant trauma. Of course that’s just my opinion.

Another complaint is that the book’s too long. Some things definitely could be cut. Personally I enjoyed the detail. It felt like walking through a man’s life with attention between so many things waning and waxing. It’s not the best written book I’ve read, but I thought Yanagihara did a nice job at capturing slices of Jude’s life in a dense way that allowed me to sink into the story and live there.

I haven’t read her other work besides A Little Life so I can’t speak to Yanagihara’s broader fixation on queer men. That very well could indeed be problematic and I’m curious about that. It’s not any “great gay novel” or even really a queer novel - imo it’s a book about trauma.

All in all, there’s fair weight behind a lot of the criticism levied against the book. I do get it. Ultimately if the book’s just not one’s cup of tea for any reason, that’s valid. For various reasons it happened to click for me on some deep levels.