Hawaiian-born Hanya Yanagihara is a journalist for The New York Times and the author of two novels. Her debut, The People in Trees, was a coolly brilliant account of Norton Perina, a Nobel Prizewinning scientist accused of child abuse that swept between colonialisation and moral relativism. Her follow-up, A Little Life, is almost a mirror image – a relentlessly, even exhaustingly emotional account of four friends navigating modern-day New York. Already hailed as a modern American classic, this epic tale centres on Jude, who survives brutal abuse in his formative years to become a wealthy and respected corporate lawyer. As his friends discover, no amount of success or happiness seems to erase the appalling events that all but destroyed him. Yanagihara talks to James Kidd about her Japanese heritage, her childhood in Hawaii, about death, unapologetically moving fiction and her desire to live in Asia.
A Little Life, your second novel, has earned rave reviews in America, but has also been described as emotionally gruelling and even harrowing. Was this your intention?
There is nothing subtle about the book. I really push the conventions of a literary novel, and the restraint of the contemporary literary novel. We are in an era of literary novels where it is about distance. A Little Life is not about distance. It is about largeness and exaggeration of emotions. I did mean it to feel a little vulgar – a little extreme on the senses.
Despite its title, A Little Life offers an unflinching portrait of suffering and death in 21st century America. What is your own view about suicide?
If you have a friend who is very damaged, what is your responsibility to that person? I do think there is a point where some people are too damaged to be alive. One thing I wanted readers to ask themselves is: Is there a point in which somebody really is better off being dead? I don’t know the answer to that.