Review

I found this book during a time when I really wanted to move to New York and, quite appropriately, I found it through an article in The New Yorker. I was sold just hearing the mentionings of four friends flocking to the city, a place 'populated by the ambitious,' and the novel really does succeed in capturing those friendships as well as romanticizing the best parts about New York. It's a book that I looked forward to reading everyday and knew would be hard to put down each time because of its gripping, graphic, devastating, and beautiful content. The characters in A Little Life are unparalleled to any other book I've read. I wish I could give Andy and Jude and Willem and Harold each a Nobel Peace Prize or a real life hug because they are a few of the people in the novel that affected me the most and who still haven't really left my consciousness, as most other book characters do. I've also never felt so much emotion as I did reading a few of the scenes, and flipping each page was like a total shot to the heart because I knew that the worst was going to happen. As a reader, it's hard to sit and watch it unfold, but it's a really gratifying experience to be able to feel so much from a book. After finishing A Little Life, I knew I would struggle to find anything emotionally equivalent to it, as it really contains some of the most heartfelt and painful scenes I've encountered through reading. I also love how Yanagihara talks about friendships, as the compassion and gratitude Jude possesses for his loved ones is a lot like how I feel about my special people as well. I can't express how much I adored this book, so it'll definitely have to be categorized as my favorite read ever!

Quotes (I'm so sorry there's a lot for this one...)

"There had been periods in his twenties when he would look at his friends and feel such a pure, deep contentment that he would wish the world around them would simply cease, that none of them would have to move from that moment, when everything was in equilibrium.."

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"Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified."

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"He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved."

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"Here, however, you made art because it was the only thing you'd ever been good at, the only thing, really, you thought about between shorter bursts of thinking about the things everyone thought about: sex and food and sleep and friends and money and fame. But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils."

"New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone had in common."

"...but in those moments he would at times find himself thinking, This is enough. This is more than I hoped. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people's words!"

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"...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for loss, sometimes wonderfully."

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"Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined by certainties than by ambiguities."

"But it was true that for the first time, he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown up to trust might someday betray him anyways, and that as disappointing as it might be, it was inevitable as well, and that life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would."

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"'I love you,' he calls to them, and they shout it back at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still distinguish each individual voice."