Hanya Yanagihara’s New Novel Offers an Inside Look into the Mysterious Male Psyche

At a whopping 720 pages long (and almost three pounds heavy), Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (Doubleday) requires serious commitment. But once you get yourself going in these pages, you’ll quickly find yourself immersed in an epic, decades-spanning story of four best friends living and growing up in New York City, from their post-college graduate days to their middle-aged years. There’s JB the artist, Malcolm the architect, Willem the actor, and at the heart of the novel, the tortured Jude, an attorney who reveals to suffer from such a devastating childhood that he and his brethren are affected in crippling ways over the course of their 30 years together into adulthood.

The affable writer behind this novel, Hanya Yanagihara, though, is a different story altogether. Yanagihara, who is not at all somber in real life, works as an editor and professional jetsetter at Conde Nast Traveler, and needless to say, is a busy woman on-the-go. But over an afternoon tea, we found time to ask Yanagihara about how she managed to write a novel with a full-time job, why she is drawn to male characters, and what she’s watching on television. A Little Life is out now.

Yahoo Style: Let’s start with the sheer size of this book — it’s over 700 pages long! How long did it take you to write this?
Hanya Yanagihara: It actually came very fast, about 18 months from start to finish [after my first book The People in the Trees (Anchor)]. I was lazy writing Trees; that took me 16 years to write. But this book came very quickly. I knew exactly where this story was going every step of the way and it was just a matter of physically sitting down and writing it. I wrote for three hours a day Monday through Thursday, and six hours Friday through Sunday. It felt like a possession in both a good and bad way. The enduring image I have in my mind is that it’s July 4th weekend and everyone else is at a friend’s house upstate, and I was sitting in my non-air-conditioned apartment at 11PM on a Saturday writing. Another image that comes to mind is I took a trip to Japan and spent most of my time in a country I love sitting in my room writing. I had to write while I had wind in my sails. It was a miserable 18 months! I didn’t go out, I didn’t see friends except for my best friend Jared who was also my one reader. It was intense. Other areas in life started slipping: my hygiene, health, the state of my apartment. I’ll probably never have another writing experience like this ever again. It took a lot out of me.

YS: Did you have any idea that this book was going to turn out so lengthy?
HY: The manuscript itself was actually 940 pages! I didn’t cut anything. Through the magic of shrinking down the type, the book came out much smaller [at 720 pages] but I did know that the final manuscript would be about 950 to 1100 pages. I was prepared for that. My editor was not. My editor was trying to get me to cut 200 pages but then he admitted he couldn’t figure out where in the book those pages could come out from. He was very gracious about it in the end. I get it, this is a business. The publisher is concerned about sales. My agent and I had talked about dividing it into two books but there just wasn’t a clean way to do it.

YS: Let’s talk about the four friends in the book: Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB. As a female writer, why did you want to work with all male characters?
HY: I think men — not just in our culture, but in all cultures — are given a smaller emotional toolbox to work with. I look at my male friends and it doesn’t matter where they were raised, if they’re gay or straight. There’s just something about men that they are never fully allowed to express: vulnerability, fear, shame, helplessness. It’s not as socially acceptable. As a woman and a writer who is allowed to have full access to the range of human emotions, it was interesting and liberating to work with male characters who weren’t equipped with that same sort of latitude.

YS: It’s also interesting to me that for an Asian-American writer such as yourself, you instead made two of your main characters, JB and Malcolm, black — one being Haitian, the other being mixed-race. It’s clear that race was integral to their character but it wasn’t overtly hitting you on the head as a reader.
HY: I can’t remember where I read it, but someone once said that being gay is not a character trait, it’s an aspect of who you are. You can’t just write so-and-so is a gay man and let the reader try to fill in the blanks of what that means through their various stereotypes and cliches. So in the same way, I wanted my characters fully-formed. In this case, JB and Malcolm’s blackness isn’t meant to stand for anything other than the happen to be characters who are black in the universe of this book. Race is an important subject to me personally. One of the reasons I’ve never written about Asians is because I can’t figure out a way to write about it that doesn’t make it feel like a screed. But as long as you’re respectful to your characters and think of them as fully-formed humans, and race is an aspect of who they are and not as an adjective, I think you can successfully write about any race.

YS: Let’s talk about Jude. He’s such a tragic character who suffers through so much — sexual abuse, violence, self-harm. This book is making a lot of people cry. Did you know that would be a reaction?
HY: I’m personally not a crier but there were certain moments towards the end where I nearly backed out of it because it was too hard to write. It was a troubling book for me but I didn’t write the book to illicit tears. Everything is hyper real. The horrors, the love, the compassion are all exaggerated — I wanted this to feel like a fairy tale in a lot of ways. Everything is just a little bit out of time. The dates are never named. There are no space breaks. I wanted this to feel deeply immersive and slightly out of place. I wanted to push the book right to the point of being too much and hover on that line for as much as I could. My friend Jared told me he didn’t cry until the end. In some ways it’s gratifying [to hear this book is making people cry], but it really wasn’t intended.

YS: But I should mention to readers that you’re not at all a dark person!
HY: I think all writers are different on the page than they are in person. Most writers are much more compassionate on the page than they are in real life. As corny as this sounds, you really need to love humanity and be interested in humanity’s problems in order to be any sort of novelist. One of the things that helped me is having a day job. It was a gift to me that for many hours of the day, I got to be lifted out of my book so I could go to work. You can’t live inside the world of your book. You have to be a person that interacts with the world. So it makes me glad when people think there’s a divide between who I am as a person and who I am on the page.

YS: Do you read critiques or reviews of your own work?
HY: No. I can’t do it. It’s too slippery of a slope. I’m self-involved already, and I can’t become more self-involved. Also a writer friend once told me, “The good ones are never good enough, and the bad ones stick with you forever.” So there’s really no point in reading them.

YS: How did you come up with the title A Little Life?
HY: The title is in reference to Jude’s feelings towards the smallness and meaninglessness of his own life. But the title was also about how all of our lives are small. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. Every life is small but every life is not less valuable because of it. [I was thinking about] how frequently we dip in and out of people’s lives, sometimes in a small way, sometimes in a bigger way and those interactions we have.

YS: What’s next? Another book?
HY: Oh god, no. [Laughs] I haven’t written anything else since since July 2013 when I turned this book in. I probably won’t be writing for a while because I don’t have anything else to say at this moment. I don’t have any other ideas that I wanna live with for another two years. I’m hanging out, watching TV.

YS: What are you watching?
HY: I love Girls. It’s one of the only shows that doesn’t romanticize youth, and it makes me think “Thank god I’m middle-aged!” You’re just reminded of how horrible your 20s can be. It’s also a great show because none of the characters are really that likeable and I find it fascinating. It’s a genius show. I love it. I’m such a Ray. Probably grumpy Ray from season one.

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