While a number of books could plausibly compete for the title of Saddest American Novel Ever Written, it’s unlikely that any of them could top Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which is still making readers weep 10 years after it was first published.
The novel follows three decades in the life of a group of college friends in New York, centered around Jude, a disabled man who has endured unimaginable trauma in his past. To call it emotionally wrenching would be a severe understatement.
Critics (mostly) fell hard for the novel, including one from Kirkus, who wrote in a starred review, “The phrase ‘tour de force’ could have been invented for this audacious novel.” The book won the second Kirkus Prize for fiction and made shortlists for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award.
A Little Life is a gay-themed novel that, as Garth Greenwell wrote in the Atlantic, “[avoids] the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel.” It also dove headlong into the theme of trauma with an intensity uncommon in other bestsellers of the time. Not everyone applauded the paces Yanagihara put her characters through, with some accusing her of writing “trauma porn.”
The novel’s most lasting legacy might be its unflinching look at suffering: It gave readers and authors permission to examine intense pain in their own lives, with an emotional honesty and rawness that still resonates. It endures because it examines the ways we endure—until we don’t.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
