In the 10 years since its publication, A Little Life has earned quite the polarizing reputation. Some say it's the saddest/most devastating book they've ever read. Others say it's trauma porn. I'm here to say that I think it can be both, and that I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I don't know if it's correct to say that I enjoyed reading this book, but I can certainly say that I found it to be incredibly engaging and worthy of a personal score of 9/10 regarding my opinion of its quality as a work of art.
Selfishly, part of the motivation behind me writing this post at all is simply a means of reflecting on my own thoughts/feelings for my own personal benefit. But since I like to share and yap with strangers online, I wanted to do it in a way that possibly generated discussion too! Sorry friends, this is gonna be a pretty long post, but it's a pretty long book!
Tl;dr – If you hated this book, I get it. If you loved this book, I get that too. I wouldn't consider either opinion to be invalid or off-base.
What I didn't like and/or Why I can understand people disliking this book
The sheer magnitude and quantity of absolutely horrific things that happen to one person over the course of their life in this book is, if we're being honest, so statistically unlikely that it absolutely causes a kind of existential frustration if you're a reader who needs their realistic fiction to feel plausible. There's a certain level of suspension of disbelief that is required to read this book and not feel completely overwhelmed by the simple improbability of it all. This is where the "porn" part of trauma porn comes in most for me. It definitely hits a gratuitous level of negativity at points.
Some people really struggle with reading flawed characters, characters who make the kind of mistakes that the readers themselves would never forgive if they were on the receiving end of them. Some people are left feeling deeply unsatisfied if there doesn't feel like there's a moral to the story and/or a valuable perspective gained by the protagonist(s) through character development. If that describes you as a reader (and I don't at all mean this judgmentally) I highly doubt you'd enjoy reading this book.
Trigger warnings. This book has SO MANY possible triggers for people. SA, domestic abuse, parental favoritism, childhood abandonment, pedophilia, self-harm/talk of suicide, and probably more I'm failing to mention. If you cannot read books with any of those topics presented (again, completely non-judgmentally) this book is absolutely not for you.
Lastly (and the most tame reason), while several of the characters do not come from money and are not well off financially, there's still a sort of pretentious hoity-toity aura to the characters because they're well-educated (from what appears to be a very prestigious American University, but it's never named) and basically all of their peers are cut from that same cloth. That, combined with the fact that many of them are in the professional arts of some sort, it's just a personality type that not everybody will enjoy reading. In fact I'd almost argue you'd have to have known/been close to at least one person who is similar to one (but hopefully several) of the characters in order to gravitate towards this book.
What I did like about this book
When I think of the phrase "trauma porn" I think about something where the traumatic events themselves are the things that keep me coming back, lusting for them in a "fuck me up fam, make me want to curl into the fetal position and sob" kind of way. But that's not what kept me coming back to reading this book. As I mentioned just above, it helps tremendously to have known characters in real life who are similar to those in this book. And I have absolutely been close to several people in my life (as well as directly relating to some of them as an individual) who these characters reminded me of, in both positive and negative ways. As such, I kept coming back to reading this book because these characters felt so human to me. In their ups and their downs, their rationale, while often deeply flawed, resonated very strongly and evoked a deep empathy within me for myriad reasons. I didn't keep coming back to get hurt, I kept coming back because I was interested in their stories.
For as aggressively upsetting as many aspects of this book were, there were some unbelievably heartwarming parts as well. The lowest lows helped emphasize the highest highs and vice versa. They ebbed and flowed throughout the book in such a way that kept me on my toes and encouraged me to keep going. I finished this book in 8 days, which means I averaged right about 100 pages per day, just shy of 38,000 words per day. But there were days I didn't read it at all, and days where I read twice that much. It was easy to just keep reading from a prose and continuity perspective.
On a basic level, these is obviously a catharsis which comes from the emotional release of a book like this if it hits right. And I can absolutely say that it hit right for me. I'm no stranger to crying while reading, but it's typically from moments of overwhelming joy, the cataclysmic relief of tension when something happy/joyous occurs. And that absolutely happened here, but it also went beyond that. This is the first book that has ever gotten me to cry over something that was heartbreakingly sad.
If you've never known somebody like Jude in your life, somebody who has such a punishingly negative opinion of their own self worth, this book probably won't feel very realistic to you. But as somebody who has spent time around people who view themselves in that harsh of a light, I think Yanagihara did a phenomenal job at capturing the essence of that kind of person's level of public masking and internal turmoil, of their utter unwillingness to believe that anything truly good can be happening to them, or that they somehow don't deserve those good things. It was painful to read, but it did feel authentic to that experience. And in addition to that, I think she really nailed the reactive elements of loved ones confronted with the realities that a person like Jude faces. Those also were painful to read for countless reasons, but once again authentic to the experience. Or at least, authentic to my own experience.
I thought this was an incredibly well-done character study of a person who somehow managed to find some surface-level success despite society itself having failed him at absolutely every possible step on his way to adulthood, and the social elements that go along with it.
by PsyferRL