A Little Life by

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

In rich and resplendent prose, Hanya Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
--front flap

things i liked:
1. beautifully written
2. good representation

things i didn't like:
1. so much shit happened in Jude's childhood, maybe a little too much, made me a bit numb
2. plateaued a little in the middle of the book. while i understand it's meant to be more detail-oriented, it needed a little bit of more momentum from the story line.
3. i just wish Jude was a little bit less self-pitying
4. it felt a little feminine, maybe because it was written by a female author. she didn't understand the male psyche well enough (in my personal opinion)

Read this a couple months ago and just had to get through the last couple tens of pages. The book is...a lot; you have four characters, and in the beginning it feels confusing because you can't keep track of all of them. Eventually, you keep focus on two of them, while one has episodic appearances and the other one is literally there just to design the others' apartments; I would've loved to see Malcom join the others a lot more, because otherwise this feels like a three friends and another person scenario rather than the four friends that share a deep bond type thing that the synopsis indicated. I've honestly picked up this book because I have heard many individuals talk about how this book made them bawl so hard, so I had to check it out. While the few chapters that talk about Jude's past experiences are considerably graphic and can be triggering to some individuals, I can't but feel that the author has diluted the level of seriousness that the scenes should have had; throughout the book, all the characters want to know things about Jude's past and it is always described as something horrific and gruesome, and as such, you have this sensation that the author couldn't control themselves to keep the twist and secret for the end and left little bits across the book to sort of keep you involved.
Leaving that aside, the book is realistic; the characters are vivid and their relationships are similar to those that adults have in real life. The progression is believable, and the book correctly describes how one should act and behave with a friend that has a troubled past. It might be just the fact that I have read them after a couple of months and while I was reading something completely different, but the last twenty pages really saved the book and brought it from questionably mediocre to a decent contemporary novel.

This book's a real tearjerker! As other reviewers said though, in parts it might feel forced. I don't mind heavy subject matters, but this would have gotten 5 stars from me only if some of the heaviness was better balanced. E.g. maybe some of Jude's heavy struggles could've been replaced with another character's POV having more defined ups and downs.

I get that the point is to emphasise how isolated Jude feels with his big problems compared to his friends' 'normal' problems, but that concept didn't need to be taken to the extremes that it was. After a point it really was numbing and just piling on struggles didn't add to the emotional impact anymore.

“Life is so sad. It's so sad, and yet we'll do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.”

4.5 I think???? Maybe.

Non-spoilers: The writing of this book is beautiful, but it has some parts that seemed unnecessary to elongate the story where it didn't really have to. Once knowing the focus characters and incidents, it's easy to skim over parts that didn't connect too much to the story. The synopsis of the book threw me off, as it is true, but the centerpiece of the story is slightly off from it, particularly regarding the friends. I was more frustrated and angry with many of the parts of the story, shocking images of all that's happened.

Spoilers: I was so angry at Jude throughout the entire book because he refused therapy, the idea of "I deserve this", and rejection of help for the majority of the book. But now with the ending, I'm not sure what to feel. How do you even feel after that? All the anger poofed after Willem's death; the most impacting moment for me was when Jude imagined himself with Willem's arms around him, the sandalwood scent on his clothes that eventually faded, desperately trying to conserve and save it in the closet. Can I think about sandalwood the same way before I read the book? Probably not. I feel that pretty much everything in this book is all unfortunate things that happen in life. It's so sad, yet we do it. It's so painful, yet we resort to dark thoughts and pain. Can we help people? Yeah. Can we try to fix someone? As much as we want to, people won't accept, won't see how much you care, won't give in. And that's reality sometimes.Edit: After some discussion in the BLC, it's understandable that Jude didn't want to accept therapy because he didn't want to expose himself and relive everything of the past. It seemed easier just to keep it in. It's still just heartbreaking that nothing would, will, and can heal someone like Jude.