a little life essay

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A Little Life: why everyone should read this modern-day classic

It may be dark and traumatic, but Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel offers a refreshingly modern take on friendship in the age of anxiety

I t’s early in the morning when my brother rings me, exhausted and strung out. He didn’t get much sleep the night before; he was up reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, speeding towards the book’s devastating conclusion.

Ever since Christmas – when the novel’s prevalence on year-end lists guaranteed its spot among my friends as a gloomy, dauntingly large stocking filler – the messages have been rolling in.

My friend Tom texted, “Horrendous but there are 150+ pages of bad stuff,” and then, a week later, “I am still thinking about the book.” On Facebook, one friend told me, “IT IS SLAYING ME,” and another suggested a support group.

They’re not alone. According to Jon Michaud in the New Yorker : “Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you and take over your life.” He’s right: the big book of our Australian summer is as bleak and addictive as they come.

Set in the present, A Little Life is about four young men – friends from the same college – who move to New York to chase big careers. They are all, improbably, incredibly successful: JB in the art world, Malcolm as a “starchitect”, Willem as an actor and Jude as a litigator. The story narrows its focus on Jude: broken, full of secrets, self-harming, slicing his calves and arms at 2am, his body a web of scar tissue.

Yes, it’s a lovely beach read.

I finished A Little Life and I feel like I just climbed out of a well and my fingernails are torn up — Meredith Alling (@meremyth) January 17, 2016

Reading, of course, is a solo activity. But occasionally a book forces demands on you that are so immense you need consolation from others. You urge your book club to read it (or you form a book club to that end); you post status updates, you tweet; you give it to other people to read, burdening them so that you’re not left alone with this thing .

It’s not just me and my pals. According to the Wall Street Journal , in “recent months it [the book] has gathered momentum, fuelled by booksellers and readers, particularly on Twitter, where people have shared their intensely emotional responses … [On Twitter] they have called it ‘upsetting’, ‘harrowing’ and ‘traumatic’. But many also say it’s the best book they have ever read.”

i will genuinely never recover from reading a little life — s ☾ (@deadgansey) January 17, 2016

Snape died, Bowie died, my boiler broke and I'm in the final chapters of A Little Life. January is proving to be a very bleak month. — Sophie Robinson (@SophieRbnsn89) January 16, 2016

So why has it struck such a chord? Despite being on the Booker shortlist , the US novelist’s prose is a little patchy and the plot is at times almost operatic in its hysteria. How much suffering and abuse can one character believably endure? Yanagihara told the Guardian : “One of the things my editor and I did fight about is the idea of how much a reader can take,” and you’ll find it hard to find another mainstream literary fiction that equals the most egregious “misery memoir” for its plotlines. As the New Yorker pointed out, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Emma Donoghue’s Room let the worst abuses appear off stage. Not so here.

Sometimes books come along that match the times. A Little Life is the perfect chronicle of our age of anxiety, providing all its attendant dramas (cutting, binges and childhood sexual abuse) as well as its solaces: friendship, drugs, travel, love affairs and interior design.

In the New York Review of Books , Daniel Mendelsohn noted the novel “reveals itself as a very twenty-first century tale indeed: abuse, victimisation, self-loathing” and wondered if a “generalised sense of helplessness and acute anxiety have become the norm”.

The piece referred to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a new prevalence of cases in which seemingly trivial things (a mouse in the dorm room, for instance) caused great upset to the young people involved, leading them to seek counselling. “Young people are increasingly encouraged to see themselves not as agents in life but as potential victims: of their dates, their roommates, their professors, of institutions and history in general,” Mendelsohn wrote.

In this culture, he said, the victim has the status: “To such readers [of A Little Life], the ugliness of this author’s subject must bring a kind of pleasure, confirming their pre-existing view of the world as a site of victimisation and little else.”

Generalised anxiety and dread is in the atmosphere, after all. In the new godless world, there are no fixed external points or a commonly held set of beliefs; all that was solid has long ago melted into air. Generation Y, raised with the promise of an extraordinary life – a spectacular career, freewheeling adventures, money, love, the lot – has found that promise undelivered. Suddenly there’s a lot to be afraid of; success is difficult to achieve and hard to hang on to, you can’t defeat your past and, in the words of musician Father John Misty, “No one ever really knows you and life is brief.”

Our daily social interactions have blown out from a few dozen to potential thousands, which we carry around with us every moment on our smartphones. Restless capital means a working life that more closely resembles greyhounds chasing the rabbit than any kind of craftsmanship. There’s no rest, no respite, no commonly held beliefs to bind us together, and there’s a gap between dreams and reality; the big life you wanted is the little life you made.

But if anxiety is our age’s burden, then friendship is its balm.

Friendship is the solace in A Little Life, as it is in any life riven with anxiety, and it is rendered so exquisitely lifelike here – replete with beauty and dark currents – that it almost approximates the real thing.

The characters’ friendships represent the type of love known as agape, described by CS Lewis in The Four Loves as the highest level of love known to humanity: “A selfless love, a love that was passionately committed to the wellbeing of the other.” Mark Twain put friendship at the centre of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and David Malouf did it with Johnno, but most novelists’ stick to Big Love – the love that includes sex, romance, marriage and ever after.

Yet it’s friendship that saves us time and time again, from the schoolyard to the office and beyond – so why aren’t there more novels and films about it? Why is the sexual relationship always at the centre?

Of course there is sex in A Little Life, but it is sex between friends – and then it becomes something else entirely. Willem thinks at one point of his relationship with Jude: “They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognised by history or immortalised in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”

A standout novel of 2014, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 , also featured a friendship at its centre (this one between a man and a woman) and an anxious protagonist in an anxious city, wedged between hurricanes Sandy and Irene. According to Emily Witt in the Guardian : “The close platonic friendship between Alex and Ben has no precedent that I can think of in recent fiction, despite the prevalence of such relationships in the world around me.”

Similarly, it’s the varied complexities of friendship – light, dark; support, competition; admiration, jealousy; love, obsession – which forms the heart of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels series, the runaway success of the past few years.

Most books are still caught up in a world where romance and sex takes precedence, but we’re now in a cultural moment in which relationships – romantic, sexual, platonic, polygamous, online, all this together and more – are accepted as much more fluid and complex than they used to be. As Willem would put it, we are inventing new types of relationships.

A Little Life succeeds and connects because it is willing to explore those nuances. We mightn’t be able to recognise ourselves in the darker material – the cutting, the urge for annihilation – but something rings true and real about the love between friends in an anxious world.

So if you see us sitting on beaches with a big book, weeping, you’ll know why.

Hanya Yanagihara

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A Little Life Essay Topics & Writing Assignments

Essay Topic 1

What message does Yanagihara send within the pages of A Little Life concerning the link between guilt and responsibility?

Essay Topic 2

Trace the characterization arc of Jude’s character throughout the novel A Little Life. Discuss whether Jude is a round or flat character and whether Jude is a static or dynamic character.

Essay Topic 3

Determine Yanagihara’s message within the novel A Little Life regarding the idea that euthanasia should be an option available for people who truly wish to end their lives.

Essay Topic 4

Discuss Yanigihara’s reasons for including instances of foreshadowing within the novel and how the use of foreshadowing connects with the narrative’s themes and messages.

Essay Topic 5

Look carefully at the passages of A Little Life that describe the close relationship between Willem and Jude. What is Yanagihara’s purpose for discussing at length the nature of the connection...

(read more Essay Topics)

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Book Reviews

'a little life': an unforgettable novel about the grace of friendship.

John Powers

A Little Life

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America is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times . We just love tales about healing.

But how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life , a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience . As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night.

The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages — yes, 700 — we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.

Yanagihara has a keen eye for social detail, and reading her early riff on actors like Willem who work as waiters, you may think she's offering something familiar — a generational portrait like Mary McCarthy's The Group or the witty, emblematic realism of Jonathan Franzen. In fact, the book's apparent normalcy lures you into the woods of something darker, stranger and more harrowing. Turns out that everything largely orbits around one of the four, Jude, whose gothic past Yanagihara slowly reveals.

For those who want trigger warnings, consider yourself warned — Jude's tale has enough triggers for a Texas gun show. The poor guy may endure the harshest childhood in fiction, one that's equal parts Dickens, Sade and Grimm's Fairy Tales . Evidently named for the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing, Jude is treated so badly that I flashed back to my mom reading me the book Beautiful Joe , about a dog so cruelly abused that I melted into inconsolable weeping.

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago. Sam Levy/Courtesy of Doubleday hide caption

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago.

Yanagihara writes with even more trenchant precision about the scars on the adult Jude's soul — the self-hatred and self-destructiveness, the yearning for love laced with utter mistrust, the baroque defense mechanisms he erects to keep anyone from learning who he really is. He struggles again and again, in long frustrating detail, to recover from his past, along with support from his friends, his doctor, Andy, and his law-school mentor, Harold, who becomes a father figure.

Now, I should also warn you that these struggles become too much, as sometimes happens with a John Cassavetes movie. Readers will be ready to move on, even if Jude is not. Then again, the book's driven obsessiveness is inseparable from the emotional force that will leave countless readers weeping.

Besides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories — "People don't change," Jude decides — it calls on our imaginative sympathy. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends — and readers — must work to enter. Not that this is impossible, mind you. He's no alien. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches.

While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him; the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life , it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.

A Little Life : The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here

Hanya Yanagihara’s novel is an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America.

In a 2013 essay for Salon , the culture writer Daniel D’Addario lamented the absence of a big, ambitious novel about gay life in America today. While the number of LGBT characters in mainstream novels has increased, he argued, they’re too often relegated to subplots or “window dressing,” their lives left “sketchy and oblique.” D’Addario surveyed a number of prominent gay writers about his thesis, and the next day Tyler Coates summarized their views for Flavorwire in a piece titled “ The Great Gay Novel is Never Going to Happen .”

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But I think it’s possible that novel has happened, even if no one has quite realized it yet. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was released in March, is one of the most buzzed-about books of the season, hailed as a “tour de force,” “extraordinary,” “elemental and irreducible,” “astonishing,” and the work of “ a major American novelist .” But no coverage of the book I’ve seen has discussed it as a novel fundamentally about gay lives—as the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.

The book follows a group of four men—Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm—over three decades of friendship, from their years as college roommates to the heights of professional success. Three of them form their primary physical and emotional bonds with other men, though sometimes in ways that challenge the usual nomenclatures. Of the novel’s main characters, only JB unambiguously embodies an immediately recognizable and unambivalent gay identity. Willem spends much of his adulthood pursuing sexual relationships with women, before he recognizes his desire for Jude and acknowledges their friendship as a life partnership. In college, JB calls Jude “the Postman” because he seems to entirely escape the usual categories: “We never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him … [He’s] post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.”

The complexity of the characters’ relationships to sexual identity is one way Yanagihara elevates them from mere “window dressing,” and I suspect it’s one reason A Little Life hasn’t been recognized as a book fundamentally about gay male experience. Another is that readers have come to expect such books to be written by gay men and to be at least plausibly confessional. From Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982) to Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2011), novels about gay men and their lives have often been more or less easily mappable onto the author’s biography. In essays and interviews , Yanagihara has spoken of her desire instead to write across difference, exploring what she sees as specifically male friendships and emotional communication.

Just as Yanagihara’s characters challenge conventional categories of gay identity, so A Little Life avoids the familiar narratives of gay fiction. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped modern gay identity—sickness and discrimination—obliquely, avoiding the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel. Her characters suffer relatively little anxiety about the public reception of their sexual identities—only Malcolm will be tormented by coming out, before realizing that in fact he’s straight—and HIV is conspicuously absent from the book’s weirdly ahistorical New York City.

But queer suffering is at the heart of A Little Life . The novel centers on Jude, who’s 16 when he arrives at an affluent New England college with only a backpack of baggy clothes. Parentless and horribly scarred, with his legs disfigured in an incident whose details he guards as closely as everything else about his past, he’s profoundly aware of his “extreme otherness.” The book slowly discloses luridly gothic episodes from his life before college, among them abandonment, childhood in a monastery, horrifying physical and sexual abuse, prostitution, and abduction. “You were made for this, Jude,” he’s told by the only adult he loves, a monk who betrays his trust, and Jude comes to believe that his suffering is a consequence of what he is: “He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to be used.”

Jude’s childhood is an extreme iteration of the abandonment, exploitation, and abuse that remain endemic in the experience of queer young people. Recent discussion of that experience has been dominated by an affirmative narrative—“It Gets Better”—that may be true for most. But it isn’t true for Jude. Even as he acquires wealth and power, Jude’s sense of the logic of his life never changes. His self-loathing is shocking from the start, and only grows more abject: he is “a nothing,” “rotten,” “useless,” “ugly,” “a piece of junk,” “inhuman … deficient … disgusting.” “Every year, his right to humanness diminished,” he reflects late in the novel; “every year, he became less and less of a person.” After the abuse he has suffered, he will never be able to able to enjoy sex, even as he craves the physical and emotional intimacy he finds in his partnership with Willem.

Both the intensity of pain Jude endures and other aspects of his and his friends’ lives—each is brilliant, each becomes not just successful but famous—strain credulity, and while Yanagihara has insisted that the novel’s plot is “not, technically, implausible,” it’s clear that the book is after something other than strict realism. This has annoyed some critics. In The New York Times Book Review , Carol Anshaw accused the novel both of being “allegorical” in its disregard for social and historical reality, and of placing the reader in a voyeuristic attitude toward suffering that’s so baroque as to seem like “a contrivance.”

To understand the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its characters’ inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera . The book is scaled to the intensity of Jude’s inner life, and for long passages it forces the reader to experience a world that’s brutally warped by suffering. Again and again A Little Life conveys Jude’s sense of himself through elaborate metaphor: he is “a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth,” “a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled,” “a scooped out husk.” His memories are “hyenas,” his fear “a flock of flapping bats,” his self-hatred a “beast.” This language infects those closest to him, so that for Willem, learning about his childhood is “plunging an arm into the snake- and centipede-squirming muck of Jude’s past.” In its sometimes grueling descriptions of Jude’s self-harm and his perceptions of his own body, the book reminds readers of the long filiation between gay art and the freakish, the abnormal, the extreme—those aspects of queer culture we’ve been encouraged to forget in an era that’s increasingly embracing gay marriage and homonormativity.

This is not a register of feeling or expression readers are accustomed to in American literary fiction. Yanagihara has described the experience of writing the novel as “a fever dream,” and reading it induces a similar effect. Part of this is due to the novel’s structural conceit: In nearly every section, a present-moment scene is interrupted for dozens of pages by elaborate flashbacks, mimicking the way Jude’s past irrupts into his present. Combined with the novel’s emotional extremity and the tightness of its focus on Jude’s consciousness, this nonlinear structure produces a feeling of immersion that’s almost unprecedented in my experience as a reader.

The novel’s darkness is leavened by its portrayal of Jude’s friends, whose attempts to care for him inevitably recall the communities of care formed by LGBT people in response to the AIDS crisis. Each of Jude’s friends cares for him differently, uniquely: Malcolm by designing spaces that will accommodate his disability; JB by painting portraits “kinder than the eye alone would see”; Willem by being the one person to whom he can tell his entire history. They make innumerable accommodations to Jude’s daily needs; in periods of crisis, they monitor him, making sure he eats and doesn’t harm himself.

The book vigorously defends friendship as a primary relationship, as central as marriage to the making of lives and communities. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” Willem thinks early in the novel. “Why wasn’t it even better?” For Jude, his friends “had imagined his life for him … they had allowed him to believe in possibilities that he would never have conceived.” Their relationships with one another challenge categorization. “They were inventing their own type of relationship,” Willem thinks of Jude, “one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”

These passages recall similar defenses of friendship from queer writers before the age of marriage equality, especially Edmund White. “And friendship will be elevated into the supreme consolation for this continuing tragedy, human existence,” White wrote in 1983, as he was beginning to understand both the scope of the AIDS crisis and the need for novel social arrangements to sustain queer communities through it.

“It might have been mawkish,” one character thinks about his feeling for Jude, “but it was also true.” This is the claim that animates A Little Life : that by violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama and exaggeration and sentiment, it can access emotional truths denied more modest means of expression. In this astonishing novel, Yanagihara achieves what great gay art from Proust to Almodóvar has so often sought: a grandeur of feeling adequate to “the terrifying largeness, the impossibility of the world.”

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — A Little Life — The Use of Symbolism and Imagery in “A Little Life”

The Use of Symbolism and Imagery in "A Little Life"

Categories: A Little Life Symbolism

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Words: 572 |

Published: Oct 25, 2023

Words: 572 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Introduction, jude's self-harm, houses, apartments, and cabins, jb's art series, existential questions.

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A Little Life

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Part 2, Chapters 2-3

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Part 3, Chapter 3

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Character Analysis

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The Limits of Wealth as a Cure for Trauma

Jude’s entire adult social circle is made up of extremely wealthy people. Malcolm, JB, and Willem all rise to the top of their artistic fields; Harold is not just a professor at an Ivy League university, but a famous and popular author as well. The friends Jude makes early in his law career end up doing equally well for themselves. Jude himself procures a spot at a top New York City law firm in his thirties. They are people who can afford to buy multiple houses in multiple cities, traveling between them as need or whim dictates. They can take lavish vacations at a moment’s notice. They give each other expensive gifts for celebrations and anniversaries. Jude and Willem even have their own signature scents; Willem contracts a perfumer in Europe to create them and continues to buy them on special order until his death.

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A Little Life

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A Little Life may be brutal in its depiction of abuse, pain, and human suffering—but it is not relentless. As often as the novel subjects Jude to physical and psychological torture, it also grants him temporary relief in the happy moments he shares with his friends. Jude, Malcolm , JB , and Willem meet and form a close bond in college, and their friendship endures, deepens, and evolves as they move through life. Jude and Willem’s especially close friendship later develops into a romance, and they remain life partners until Willem’s tragic death in a car accident. Willem cannot reverse Jude’s injuries or eliminate his suffering—ultimately, though Jude tries, they are unable to have a sexual relationship due to Jude’s history of sexual abuse—but his love alleviates some of the pain. Later, Jude develops a meaningful bond with Harold Stein , his law school professor. Harold and his wife, Julia , ultimately adopt Jude, offering him the unconditional parental love Jude never had the chance to have as a child.

But there is an asymmetry between the love people offer Jude and the love Jude is able to accept. Jude’s history of abuse has left him reluctant to trust others. When Jude was young, he befriended Brother Luke , a monk at the monastery where Jude grew up. Brother Luke didn’t beat Jude like the other monks, and Jude believed he could trust him. However, Luke later kidnaps Jude, forces him into sex work, and then ends up raping Jude himself—all under the guise of love. Jude’s experience with Brother Luke, and with virtually every adult he encountered throughout his childhood, teaches him to assume the worst in people. As an adult, then, Jude struggles to be open and vulnerable with his friends—even with Harold and Willem, who he knows, at the intellectual level, would never harm him. A Little Life , then, celebrates the strength and complexity of human connection. The book sees friendship as essentially restorative—it can offer comfort, relief, and stability in an otherwise brutal and unpredictable world. At the same time, though, the novel shows that there are limits to what love and friendship can fix.

Friendship and Human Connection ThemeTracker

Friendship and Human Connection Quotes in A Little Life

“But Jude,” he said, quietly, “you’re in pain. We have to get you help.”

“Nothing will help,” he said, and was silent for a few moments. “I just have to wait.” His voice was whispery and faint, unfamiliar.

“What can I do?” Willem asked.

“Nothing,” Jude said. They were quiet. “But Willem—will you stay with me for a little while?”

“Of course,” he said.

It was a great painting, and he knew it, knew it absolutely the way you sometimes did, and he had no intention of ever showing it to Jude until it was hanging on a gallery wall somewhere and Jude would be powerless to do anything about it.

When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy? How did you know when to stop?

Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was, which is why, as he moved farther and then further away from the ranch and his childhood, he felt very little pressure to change or reinvent himself. He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich. He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming, and his leaving didn’t mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity to money.

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: 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 your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”

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

Every day the improbability of the situation seemed to grow larger and more vivid in his mind; every time he glimpsed the reflection of his ugly zombie’s hobble in the side of a building, he would feel sickened: Who, really, would ever want this ? The idea that he could become someone else’s seemed increasingly ludicrous, and if Harold saw him just once more, how could he too not come to the same conclusion?

“But I’m not even in a wheelchair,” he’d said, dismayed.

“But Jude,” Malcolm had begun, and then stopped. He knew what Malcolm wanted to say: But you have been. And you will be again. But he didn’t.

“These are standard ADA guidelines,” he said instead.

“Mal,” he’d said, chagrined by how upset he was. “I understand. But I don’t want this to be some cripple’s apartment.”

He could be more like Malcolm, he thinks; he could ask his friends for help, he could be vulnerable around them. He has been before, after all; it just hasn’t been by choice. But they have always been kind to him, they have never tried to make him feel self-conscious—shouldn’t that teach him something? Maybe, for instance, he will ask Willem if he could help him with his back: if Willem is disgusted by his appearance, he’ll never say anything.

“You’ll find your own way to discuss what happened to you,” he remembers Ana saying. “You’ll have to, if you ever want to be close to anyone.” He wishes, as he often does, that he had let her […] teach him how to do it. His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something […] that manages him rather than the other way around. […] He imagines he is floating in a small bubble of water, encased on all sides by walls and ceilings and floors of ice, all many feet thick. He knows there is a way out, but he is unequipped; he has no tools to begin his work […]. He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn’t say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion.

When he has clothes on, he is one person, but without them, he is revealed as he really is, the years of rot manifested on his skin, his own flesh advertising his past, its depravities and corruptions.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself—his very life—has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed […]. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated. And in that microsecond that he finds himself suspended in the air, […] he knows that x will always equal x, no matter what he does, or how many years he moves away from the monastery, from Brother Luke, no matter how much he earns or how hard he tries to forget. It is the last thing he thinks as his shoulder cracks down upon the concrete, and the world, for an instant, jerks blessedly away from beneath him: x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.

I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?

He was careful never to say his name aloud, but sometimes he thought it, and no matter how old he got, no matter how many years had passed, there would appear Luke’s face, smiling, conjured in an instant. He thought of Luke when the two of them were falling in love, when he was being seduced and had been too much of a child, too naïve, too lonely and desperate for affection to know it. He was running to the greenhouse, he was opening the door, the heat and smell of flowers were surrounding him like a cape. It was the last time he had been so simply happy, the last time he had known such uncomplicated joy. “And here’s my beautiful boy!” Luke would cry. “Oh, Jude—I’m so happy to see you.”

He was home, and home was Jude.

“Willem’s not a health-care professional,” he remembered Andy saying. “He’s an actor.” And although both he and Jude had laughed at the time, he wasn’t sure Andy was wrong. Who was he to try to direct Jude’s mental health?

“Don’t trust me so much,” he wanted to say to Jude. But how could he? Wasn’t this what he had wanted from Jude, from this relationship? To be so indispensable to another person that that person couldn’t even comprehend his life without him? And now he had it, and the demands of the position terrified him. He had asked for responsibility without understanding completely how much damage he could do.

Eventually, he made some rules for himself. First, he would never refuse Willem, ever. If this was what Willem wanted, he could have it, and he would never turn him away. Willem had sacrificed so much to be with him, and had brought him such peace, that he was determined to try to thank him however he could. Second, he would try—as Brother Luke had once asked him—to show a little life, a little enthusiasm.

But there was the Jude he knew in the daylight, and even in the dusk and dawn, and then there was the Jude who possessed his friend for a few hours each night, and that Jude, he sometimes feared, was the real Jude: the one who haunted their apartment alone, the one whom he had watched draw the razor so slowly down his arm, his eyes wide with agony, the one whom he could never reach, no matter how many reassurances he made, no matter how many threats he levied. It sometimes seemed as if it was that Jude who truly directed their relationship, and when he was present, no one, not even Willem, could dispel him. And still, he remained stubborn: he would banish him, through the intensity and the force and the determination of his love.

“I’m not Hemming , Willem,” Jude hisses at him. “I’m not going to be the cripple you get to save for the one you couldn’t.”

On these days, he succumbed to a sort of enchantment, a state in which his life seemed both unimprovable and, paradoxically, perfectly fixable: Of course Jude wouldn’t get worse. Of course he could be repaired. Of course Willem would be the person to repair him. Of course this was possible; of course this was probable. Days like this seemed to have no nights, and if there were no nights, there was no cutting, there was no sadness, there was nothing to dismay.

He hadn’t needed to catalog his life after all—Willem had been doing it for him all along. But why had Willem cared about him so much? Why had he wanted to spend so much time around him? He had never been able to understand this, and now he never will. I sometimes think I care more about your being alive than you do , he remembers Willem saying, and he takes a long, shuddering breath.

He stopped. What he wanted to say—but what he didn’t think he could get through—was what he had overheard Malcolm say as Willem was complaining about hefting the bookcase back into place and he was in the bathroom gathering the brushes and paint from beneath the sink.

“If I had left it like it was, he could’ve tripped against it and fallen, Willem,” Malcolm had whispered. “Would you want that?”

“No,” Willem had said, after a pause, sounding ashamed. “No, of course not. You’re right, Mal.”

Malcolm, he realized, had been the first among them to recognize that he was disabled; Malcolm had known this even before he did. He had always been conscious of it, but he had never made him feel self-conscious. Malcolm had sought, only, to make his life easier, and he had once resented him for this.

He hopes for infection, something swift and fatal, something that will kill him and leave him blameless. But there is no infection. Since his amputations, there have been no wounds. He is still in pain, but no more—less, actually—than he had been in before. He is cured, or at least as cured as he will ever be.

Finally he lifts his head and sees Harold staring at him, sees that Harold is actually crying, silently, looking and looking at him. “Harold,” he says, although Andy is still talking, “release me. Release me from my promise to you. Don’t make me do this anymore. Don’t make me go on.”

“Jude,” Harold says to him, quietly. “My poor Jude. My poor sweetheart.” And with that, he starts to cry, for no one has ever called him sweetheart, not since Brother Luke. Sometimes Willem would try[..] and he would make him stop; the endearment was filthy to him […]. “My sweetheart,” Harold says again, and he wants him to stop; he wants him to never stop. “My baby.” And he cries and cries, […] for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child’s whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tendernesses, of fondnesses, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent’s reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.

“Jude,” says Dr. Loehmann. “You’ve come back.”

He takes a breath. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve decided to stay.”

When Jacob was a baby, I would find myself feeling more assured with each month he lived, as if the longer he stayed in this world, the more deeply he would become anchored to it[…]. It was a preposterous notion, of course, and it was proven wrong in the most horrible way. But I couldn’t stop thinking this: that life tethered life. And yet at some point in his life—after Caleb, if I had to date it—I had the sense that he was in a hot-air balloon, one that was staked to the earth with a long twisted rope, but each year the balloon strained and strained against its cords, […]. And down below, there was a knot of us trying to pull the balloon back to the ground, back to safety. And so I was always frightened for him, and I was always frightened of him, as well.

“It’s such a beautiful house,” I said, as I always did, and as I always did, I hoped he was hearing me say that I was proud of him: for the house he built, and for the life he had built within it.

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Hanya’s Boys

The novelist tends to torture her gay male characters — but only so she can swoop in to save them..

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By the time you finish reading A Little Life, you will have spent a whole book waiting for a man to kill himself. The novel, the second from author Hanya Yanagihara, begins as a light chronicle of male friendship among four college graduates in New York City before narrowing its focus to Jude, a corporate litigator whose decades-long struggle to repress a childhood of unrelenting torments — he was raised by pedophiles in a monastery, kidnapped and prostituted in motels, molested by counselors at an orphanage, kidnapped again, tortured, raped, starved, and run over with a car — ends in his suicide.

An unlikely beach read with a gothic riptide, A Little Life became a massive best seller in 2015. Critics lavished praise on the book, with one declaring it the long-awaited “great gay novel” for its unsparing approach to Jude, who falls in love with his male best friend. (A rare pan in The New York Review of Books prompted an indignant letter from Yanagihara’s editor.) A Little Life would go on to win the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize; it has since been adapted for the stage by the celebrated director Ivo van Hove, and last month, readers of the New York Times nominated it next to finalists like Beloved and 1984 for best book of the past 125 years.

But Yanagihara’s motivations remained mysterious. The author was born in Los Angeles to a third-generation Hawaiian Japanese father and a Seoul-born Korean mother; her father, a hematologist-oncologist, moved the family around the country for work. She has lived in Manhattan since her 20s, but her heart is in Tokyo and Hawaii. (She has called the last “the closest thing that Asian Americans have to Harlem.”) Her first novel, The People in the Trees, about a doctor who discovers immortality on an island paradise, was well but quietly received in 2013. That book featured homosexuality and pedophilia; not until A Little Life would these be revealed as consistent preoccupations. The People in the Trees took Yanagihara 18 years to write, off and on, during which time she worked as a publicist, book editor, and magazine writer. A Little Life, which she wrote while an editor at large at Condé Nast Traveler, took only 18 months.

How to explain this novel’s success? The critic Parul Sehgal recently suggested A Little Life as a prominent example of the “ trauma plot ” — fiction that uses a traumatic backstory as a shortcut to narrative. Indeed, it’s easy to see Jude as a “vivified DSM entry” perfectly crafted to appeal to “a world infatuated with victimhood.” But Jude hates words like abuse and disabled and refuses to see a therapist for most of the novel, while Yanagihara has skeptically compared talk therapy to “scooping out your brain and placing it into someone else’s cupped palms to prod at.” (Jude’s sickest torturer turns out to be a psychiatrist.) More compelling about A Little Life — and vexing and disturbing — is the author’s omnipresence in the novel, not just as the “perverse intelligence” behind Jude’s trauma, in the words of another critic, but as the possessive presence keeping him, against all odds, alive. A Little Life was rightly called a love story; what critics missed was that its author is one of the lovers.

This is Yanagihara’s principle: If true misery exists, then so might true love. That simple idea, childlike in its brutality, informs all her fiction. Indeed, the author appears unable, or unwilling, to conceive love outside of life support; without suffering, the inherent monstrosity of love — its greed, its destructiveness — cannot be justified. This notion is inchoate in The People in the Trees , which features several characters kept on the brink of death and ends with a rapist’s declaration of love. In A Little Life, it blossoms into the anguished figure of Jude and the saintlike circle of friends who adore him. In Yanagihara’s new novel, To Paradise, which tells three tales of people fleeing one broken utopia for another, the misery principle has become airborne, passing aerosol-like from person to person while retaining its essential purpose — to allow the author to insert herself as a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health.

Two years after A Little Life was published, Yanagihara joined T magazine, the New York Times ’s monthly style insert, as editor. She has called the publication “a culture magazine masquerading as a fashion magazine” — though you’ll have to sift through many pages of luxury advertisements to confirm that. During her time at Condé Nast Traveler , the publication sent her on a staggering 12-country, 24-city, 45-day, $60,000 journey from Sri Lanka to Japan for a 2013 issue called, incredibly, “The Grand Tour of Asia.” “A trip to India isn’t complete without a stop at the legendary Gem Palace,” she wrote in a photo spread titled “The Plunder,” “and a few souvenir diamonds” — four diamond bangles, to be exact, priced up to $900 each. “When we wear a piece of custom jewelry ,” she once told readers of T , “we are adding ourselves to a legacy as old as the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians — older.”

This may be surprising. But it is easy to forget that A Little Life is an unapologetic lifestyle novel. Jude’s harrowing trials are finger-sandwiched between Lower East Side gallery openings, summers on Cape Cod, holiday in Hanoi. Critics remarked on its mouthwatering (or eye-rolling) spread of culinary delights, from duck à l’orange to escarole salad with pears and jamón, followed by pine-nut tart, tarte Tatin, and a homemade ten-nut cake Yanagihara later described as a cross between Danish rugbrød and a Japanese milk bread she once ordered at a Tokyo bakery. The book inspired celebrity chef Antoni Porowski to publish a recipe called “Gougères for Jude,” based on the canapés Jude makes for a New Year’s party before cutting his arms so badly he requires emergency medical attention; it can be found on the website for Boursin, the French herbed-cheese brand .

Indeed, Yanagihara’s onslaught of horrors could allow readers to block out, like a childhood trauma, the fact that they were reading luxury copy. Her first book was quite literally a travelogue written by a pedophile; in To Paradise, Yanagihara has not lost the familiar voice of a professional chronicler of wealth. Here are rose-hued Oriental carpets, dark-green douppioni-silk drapes, wood floors polished with macadamia oil; here are wok-fried snow peas, ginger-wine syllabub, a pine-nut tart (another one!). As in A Little Life, Yanagihara cannot help giving cheerful directions as she maneuvers her characters, tour guide–like, through New York. “We’ll cut across Christopher, and then go past Little Eight and east on Ninth Street before turning south on Fifth Avenue,” a minor character proposes during a crisis.

Perhaps I am being ungenerous. Surely novelists should describe things! Better, they should evoke them, like the dead, or the Orient. Yanagihara has a tourist’s eye for detail; this can make her a very engaging narrator. Here’s that holiday in Hanoi from A Little Life :

“[He] turned down an alley that was crowded with stall after stall of small, improvised restaurants, just a woman standing behind a kettle roiling with soup or oil, and four or five plastic stools … [He] let a man cycle past him, the basket strapped to the back of his seat loaded with spears of baguettes … and then headed down another alley, this one busy with vendors crouched over more bundles of herbs, and black hills of mangosteens, and metal trays of silvery-pink fish, so fresh he could hear them gulping.”

Now here’s days 23 and 24 of that “Grand Tour of Asia” from Condé Nast Traveler :

“You’ll see all the little tableaux … that make Hanoi the place it is: dozens of pho stands, with their big cauldrons of simmering broth … bicyclists pedaling by with basketfuls of fresh-baked bread; and, especially, those little street restaurants with their low tables and domino-shaped stools … [The next day] you’ll pass hundreds of stalls selling everything for the Vietnamese table, from mung bean noodles to homemade fish paste to Kaffir limes, as well as vendors crouched over hubcap-size baskets of mangoes, silkworms, and fish so fresh they’re still gulping for air.”

Now it is no crime to put your paid vacation into your novel. My point is simply that Yanagihara remains at heart a travel writer, if not an unreconstructed one. She seems to sense that wealth can be tilted, like a stone, to reveal the wriggling muck beneath. In a few cases, she is even making a political point, as with her abiding interest in the colonization of Hawaii. But more often in these books, wealth’s rotten underbelly is purely psychological: There are no wrongful beach houses in A Little Life, no ill-gotten hors d’oeuvre. Luxury is simply the backdrop for Jude’s extraordinary suffering, neither cause nor effect; if anything, the latter lends poignancy to the former. This was Yanagihara’s first discovery, the one that cracked open the cobbled streets of Soho and let something terrible slither out — the idea that misery bestows a kind of dignity that wealth and leisure, no matter how sharply rendered on the page, simply cannot.

To Paradise is not a novel at all. It is three books bound into a single volume: a novella, a brace of short stories, and a full-length novel. The conceit is that its three tales are set in 1893, 1993, and 2093 in alternate versions of a Washington Square townhouse. The first is a Henry James–esque period romance: David, a wealthy scion with a secret history of nervous breakdowns, rejects a proposal from the boring Charles to flee west with roguish pauper Edward. The second, a weird postcolonial fable, finds gay paralegal David hosting a dinner party with his older HIV-positive boyfriend, Charles, in honor of a terminally ill friend, while David’s father, the rightful king of Hawaii, lies dying in a psychiatric facility. The third book, the novel-length one, is a fitful attempt at speculative fiction complete with surveillance drones (“Flies”), boring names (“Zone Eight”), and a biodome over Central Park. In this New York ravaged by a century of pandemics, brain-damaged lab tech Charlie discovers her husband Edward’s infidelity, while her grandfather, a brilliant virologist, reveals his role in creating the current totalitarian government. (In a desultory bid to sew the three parts together, Yanagihara has given multiple characters the same name, without their being biologically or, indeed, meaningfully related.)

The third part of To Paradise may sound topical, but Yanagihara has a lifelong fascination with disease. She was a self-described “sickly child” whose father used to take her to a morgue where a pathologist would show her the cadavers, folding back the skin flaps like flower petals so the young girl could sketch their insides. Years later, The People in the Trees would center on a zoonotic disease that extends the sufferer’s life span while rapidly degrading cognitive function. In A Little Life, Jude’s history of abuse is equally a nutrient-rich soil for infection: his venereal diseases, acquired from clients; his cutting, which results in septicemia; his maimed legs, which, after decades of vascular ulcers and osteomyelitis, must finally be amputated. That’s to say nothing of the many minor characters in the novel who are summarily dispatched by strokes, heart attacks, multiple sclerosis, all kinds of cancer, and something called Nishihara syndrome, a neurodegenerative disease so rare the author had to make it up.

Like its predecessor, To Paradise is a book in which horrible things happen to people for no reason. The agents of misery this time have become literally inhuman: cancer, HIV, epilepsy, functional neurologic disorder, a toxic antiviral drug, the unidentified viral hemorrhagic fever that will fuel the next pandemic. A virus makes perfect sense as Yanagihara’s final avatar after three novels. The anguish it visits on humanity — illness, death, social collapse — is just an indifferent side effect of its pointless reproductive cycle. Biologists do not even agree on whether viruses are living organisms. A virus wants nothing, feels nothing, knows nothing; at most, a virus is a little life.

This is ideal for Yanagihara: pure suffering, undiluted by politics or psychology, by history or language or even sex. Free of meaning, it may more perfectly serve the author’s higher purpose. Reading A Little Life, one can get the impression that Yanagihara is somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants. In truth, Jude is a terribly unlovable character, always lying and breaking promises, with the inner monologue of an incorrigible child. The first time he cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim. Yet Yanagihara loves him excessively, cloyingly. The book’s omniscient narrator seems to be protecting Jude, cradling him in her cocktail-party asides and winding digressions, keeping him alive for a stunning 800 pages. This is not sadism; it is closer to Munchausen by proxy.

Yanagihara provides a perfect image for this kind of love. Jude’s lover, Willem, trying to prevent him from cutting himself, hugs Jude so tightly he can barely breathe. “Pretend we’re falling and we’re clinging together from fear,” Willem tells him; for a brief moment, the fiction of imminent death cuts through Jude’s self-loathing and allows him to crumple helplessly into his lover’s suffocating embrace. As he loses consciousness, Jude imagines them falling all the way to the earth’s core, where the fires melt them into a single being whom even death cannot part.

If disease is Yanagihara’s angel of death, gay men are her perfect patients. The majority of her protagonists to date are gay men, or at least men-loving men, and she approaches them with a distinct preciousness. When Jude finally reveals the details of his horrific childhood to Willem, the two are lying on the floor of a literal closet. In A Little Life, this tendency could be fobbed off as a literary technique in line with Yanagihara’s stated desire to make the novel “operatic,” but in To Paradise, her sentimentality has begun weeping like a sore. “We could never be together in the West, Edward. Be sensible! It is dangerous to be like us out there,” pleads one David. “If we couldn’t live as who we are, then how could we be free?” Indeed, the entire first book of To Paradise is set in an alternate version of 19th-century New York preposterously founded on the freedom of love; you’ll forgive me for being unmoved, at this moment in history, by the heartbreak of marriage equality.

And then there is the matter of AIDS. It’s true that To Paradise is not an AIDS novel; the actual crisis, which unfolds here just as it did in reality, is little more than a faint backdrop for a hundred pages. But this is only because Yanagihara appears to see all diseases as allegories for the human immunodeficiency virus. Charles’s ex-boyfriend Peter may only be dying of “boring old cancer, I’m afraid,” but the virus hovers over his farewell party and lingers through the novel’s succession of pandemics. The next Charles, persona non grata in a fascist state of his own design, will join other mildly oppressed gay men of New York in seeking love and support in a riverside rowhouse on Jane Street in the West Village — three blocks from the real-life AIDS memorial in Hudson River Park. This detail is mawkish in the extreme, a shameless attempt to trade on the enviable pathos of a disease transmitted through an act of love.

When A Little Life was first published, the novelist Garth Greenwell declared it “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years,” praising Yanagihara for writing a novel about “queer suffering” that was about AIDS only in spirit. This was a curious claim for several reasons. First, many of the novel’s characters, including Willem and Jude, fail to identify as gay in the conventional sense. Second, Yanagihara herself is not gay, though she says she perfunctorily slept with women at Smith College. Indeed, if A Little Life was opera, it was not La Bohème ; it was Rent. Now perhaps the great gay novel should move beyond the strictures of identity politics; Yanagihara has stubbornly defended her “right to write about whatever I want.” God forbid that only gay men should write gay men — let a hundred flowers bloom. But if a white author were to write a novel with Asian American protagonists who, while resistant to identifying as Asian American, nonetheless inhabited an unmistakably Asian American milieu, it might occur to us to ask why.

Why, then? “I don’t know,” Yanagihara told one journalist. To another, she insisted, “I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the gay-male identity that interests me.” These are baffling, even offensive responses given that she has had almost a decade to come up with better ones. But I do not think Yanagihara, an author who believes in fiction as a conscious act of avoidance, is being dishonest. “A fiction writer can hide anything she wants in her fiction, a power that’s as liberating as it is imprisoning,” she has written, explaining her refusal to go to therapy despite the urging of her best friend, the man to whom A Little Life is dedicated and whose social circle inspired the book’s friendships. “As she grows more adept at it, however,” Yanagihara continues, “she may find she’s losing practice in the art of telling the truth about herself.”

That well may be. Regardless of Yanagihara’s private life, her work betrays a touristic kind of love for gay men. By exaggerating their vulnerability to humiliation and physical attack, she justifies a maternal posture of excessive protectiveness. This is not an act of dehumanization but the opposite. There is a horrible piety to Jude, named for the patron saint of lost causes; he has been force-fed sentimentality. When the author is not doling out this smothering sort of love through her male characters (Willem, for instance), she is enacting it at the level of her own narration. Indeed, the conspicuous absence of women in her fiction may well express Yanagihara’s tendency, as a writer, to hoard female subjectivity for herself.

This brings us to Charlie, a narrator in To Paradise and Yanagihara’s only female protagonist to date. Charlie is a technician who takes care of mouse embryos at an influenza lab in Zone Fifteen. The antiviral drug that saved her life as a child has left her affectless and naïve, pitifully incapable of comprehending the extent of her own loneliness. After Charlie is raped by two boys her age — the only rape in this whole book, if you can believe it — her grandfather Charles desperately tries to ensure her safety by marrying her off to a homosexual like himself. But it is with Charlie, who longs for her husband to touch her even as she knows he never will, that the sublimation of romantic love will finally slouch into despair. When Charlie follows him to a gay haven in the West Village, having discovered notes from his lover, she is heartbroken. “I knew I would never be loved,” Charlie thinks. “I knew I would never love, either.”

But this isn’t entirely true. After Charlie’s husband dies of an unknown illness, the only woman Yanagihara has ever asked readers to care about will lie next to his corpse and kiss him for the first time — the space between them closed, at last, by death.

There is no paradise for Charlie. The odd and tuneless phrase to paradise provides a destination but withholds any promise of arrival. Perhaps this is why Yanagihara has tacked it half-heartedly onto the last sentence of each of the novel’s three books. Doom shadows every character who decides to abandon one apocryphal heaven on earth for another: the plutocratic Northeast for the homophobic West, the colonized state of Hawaii for a delusional kingdom on the beach, totalitarian America for the unknown New Britain. Every paradise is a gossamer curtain; behind it lies a pit of squalor, disease, torture, madness, and tyranny. Freedom is a lie, safety is a lie, struggle is a lie; even the luxuries Yanagihara has spent her career recording are nothing in the end. For paradise, insofar as it means heaven, also means death.

Not even love will save Yanagihara’s characters. Her fantasies of suffering and illness are designed only to produce a very specific kind of love, and this love is not curative but palliative — it results, sooner or later, in the death of the thing. If this is fatalism, it is not the sanguine fatalism of Prospero, another rightful king on another island paradise, reminding his audience that “we are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” No, it is the exsanguinating fatalism of Jude, who, out of love for his boyfriend, will try to show “a little life” — a phrase he learned from his pimp — while Willem makes love to his reluctant body. The same phrase appears in The People in the Trees, where it describes the bleak vegetative state that befalls the islanders whose disease has stretched out their life spans. In To Paradise, Charles reflects on a set of immune-compromised twins, explaining that he never became a clinician because he “was never convinced that life — its saving, its extension, its return — was definitively the best outcome.” The twins die, possibly by suicide, and Charles goes on to design death camps. “There’s a point,” Yanagihara once said of Jude, at which “it becomes too late to help some people.”

These are difficult words to read for those of us who have passed through suicidal ideation and emerged, if not happy to be alive, then relieved not to be dead. It is indeed a tourist’s imagination that would glance out from its hotel window onto the squalor below and conclude that death is the opposite of paradise, as if the locals did not live their little lives on the expansive middle ground between the two. But even Yanagihara’s novels are not death camps; they are hospice centers. A Little Life, like life itself, goes on and on. Hundreds of pages into the novel, Jude openly wonders why he is still alive, the beloved of a lonely god. For that is the meaning of suffering: to make love possible. Charles loves David; David loves Edward; David loves Charles; Charlie loves Edward; Jude loves Willem; Hanya loves Jude; misery loves company.

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Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist..

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For the past three years, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet has told a story to millions of listeners across half a dozen shows: There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy, until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found science, he found exercise. And he became strong.

Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His podcast is revelatory largely because it does not condescend, which has not been the way of public-health information in our time. He does not give the impression of someone diluting science to universally applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses. “Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s released volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube.

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Falling for dr. huberman.

Millions of people feel compelled to hear him draw distinctions between neuromodulators and classical neurotransmitters. Many of those people will then adopt an associated “protocol.” They will follow his elaborate morning routine. They will model the most basic functions of human life — sleeping, eating, seeing — on his sober advice. They will tell their friends to do the same. “He’s not like other bro podcasters,” they will say, and they will be correct; he is a tenured Stanford professor associated with a Stanford lab; he knows the difference between a neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. He is just back from a sold-out tour in Australia, where he filled the Sydney Opera House. Stanford, at one point, hung signs (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY) apparently to deter fans in search of the lab.

With this power comes the power to lift other scientists out of their narrow silos and turn them, too, into celebrities, but these scientists will not be Huberman, whose personal appeal is distinct. Here we have a broad-minded professor puppyishly enamored with the wonders of biological function, generous to interviewees (“I love to be wrong”), engaged in endearing attempts to sound like a normal person (“Now, we all have to eat, and it’s nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact”).

This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes find solidity in peer review. “People go, ‘Oh, that feels kind of like weenie stuff,’” Huberman tells Joe Rogan. “The data show that gratitude, and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good-quality social interactions … huge increases in serotonin.” “Hmmm,” Rogan says. There is a kindness to the way Huberman reminds his audience always of the possibilities of neuroplasticity: They can change. He has changed. As an adolescent, he says, he endured the difficult divorce of his parents, a Stanford professor who worked in the tech industry and a children’s-book author. The period after the separation was, he says, one of “pure neglect.” His father was gone, his mother “totally checked out.” He was forced, around age 14, to endure a month of “youth detention,” a situation that was “not a jail,” but harrowing in its own right.

“The thing that really saved me,” Huberman tells Peter Attia, “was this therapy thing … I was like, Oh, shit … I do have to choke back a little bit here. It’s a crazy thing to have somebody say, ‘Listen,’ like, to give you the confidence, like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out. We’re gonna figure this out. ’ There’s something very powerful about that. It wasn’t like, you know, ‘Everything will be okay.’ It was like, We’re gonna figure this out. ”

The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up and study all night long. He would be tenured at Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in mice and noting what grew back.

Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love mechanism, ” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with #DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).

A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he very much was for a period this fall — a period in which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank no more than once a week, practiced physiological sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my living room, “I also love mechanism”; a period during which I began to think seriously, for the first time in my life, about reducing stress, and during which both my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water; a period in which I realized that I not only liked this podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast — he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.

Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.

Some of Andrew’s earliest Instagram posts are of his lab. We see smiling undergraduates “slicing, staining, and prepping brains” and a wall of framed science publications in which Huberman-authored papers appear: Nature, Cell Reports, The Journal of Neuroscience. In 2019, under the handle @hubermanlab, Andrew began posting straightforward educational videos in which he talks directly into the camera about subjects such as the organizational logic of the brain stem. Sometimes he would talk over a simple anatomical sketch on lined paper; the impression was, as it is now, of a fast-talking teacher in conversation with an intelligent student. The videos amassed a fan base, and Andrew was, in 2020, invited on some of the biggest podcasts in the world. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he talked about experiments his lab was conducting by inducing fear in people. On The Rich Roll Podcast, the relationship between breathing and motivation. On The Joe Rogan Experience, experiments his lab was conducting on mice.

He was a fluid, engaging conversationalist, rich with insight and informed advice. In a year of death and disease, when many felt a sense of agency slipping away, Huberman had a gentle plan. The subtext was always the same: We may live in chaos, but there are mechanisms of control.

By then he had a partner, Sarah, which is not her real name. Sarah was someone who could talk to anyone about anything. She was dewy and strong and in her mid-40s, though she looked a decade younger, with two small kids from a previous relationship. She had old friends who adored her and no trouble making new ones. She came across as scattered in the way she jumped readily from topic to topic in conversation, losing the thread before returning to it, but she was in fact extremely organized. She was a woman who kept track of things. She was an entrepreneur who could organize a meeting, a skill she would need later for reasons she could not possibly have predicted. When I asked her a question in her home recently, she said the answer would be on an old phone; she stood up, left for only a moment, and returned with a box labeled OLD PHONES.

Sarah’s relationship with Andrew began in February 2018 in the Bay Area, where they both lived. He messaged her on Instagram and said he owned a home in Piedmont, a wealthy city separate from Oakland. That turned out not to be precisely true; he lived off Piedmont Avenue, which was in Oakland. He was courtly and a bit formal, as he would later be on the podcast. In July, in her garden, Sarah says she asked to clarify the depth of their relationship. They decided, she says, to be exclusive.

Both had devoted their lives to healthy living: exercise, good food, good information. They cared immoderately about what went into their bodies. Andrew could command a room and clearly took pleasure in doing so. He was busy and handsome, healthy and extremely ambitious. He gave the impression of working on himself; throughout their relationship, he would talk about “repair” and “healthy merging.” He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by Sarah. “I was never sitting around him,” she says. She cooked for him and felt glad when he relished what she had made. Sarah was willing to have unprotected sex because she believed they were monogamous.

On Thanksgiving in 2018, Sarah planned to introduce Andrew to her parents and close friends. She was cooking. Andrew texted repeatedly to say he would be late, then later. According to a friend, “he was just, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I’m going to be running hours late.’ And then of course, all of these things were planned around his arrival and he just kept going, ‘Oh, I’m going to be late.’ And then it’s the end of the night and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry this and this happened.’”

Huberman disappearing was something of a pattern. Friends, girlfriends, and colleagues describe him as hard to reach. The list of reasons for not showing up included a book, time-stamping the podcast, Costello, wildfires, and a “meetings tunnel.” “He is flaky and doesn’t respond to things,” says his friend Brian MacKenzie, a health influencer who has collaborated with him on breathing protocols. “And if you can’t handle that, Andrew definitely is not somebody you want to be close to.” “He in some ways disappeared,” says David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who calls Andrew “prodigiously smart” and “intensely engaging.” “I mean, I recently got a really nice email from him. Which I was touched by. I really was.”

In 2018, before he was famous, Huberman invited a Colorado-based investigative journalist and anthropologist, Scott Carney, to his home in Oakland for a few days; the two would go camping and discuss their mutual interest in actionable science. It had been Huberman, a fan of Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us, who initially reached out, and the two became friendly over phone and email. Huberman confirmed Carney’s list of camping gear: sleeping bag, bug spray, boots.

When Carney got there, the two did not go camping. Huberman simply disappeared for most of a day and a half while Carney stayed home with Costello. He puttered around Huberman’s place, buying a juice, walking through the neighborhood, waiting for him to return. “It was extremely weird,” says Carney. Huberman texted from elsewhere saying he was busy working on a grant. (A spokesperson for Huberman says he clearly communicated to Carney that he went to work.) Eventually, instead of camping, the two went on a few short hikes.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back. ”

Andrew Huberman declined to be interviewed for this story. Through a spokesman, Huberman says he did not become exclusive with Sarah until late 2021, that he was not doted on, that tasks between him and Sarah were shared “based on mutual agreement and proficiency,” that their Thanksgiving plans were tentative, and that he “maintains a very busy schedule and shows up to the vast majority of his commitments.”

In the fall of 2020, Huberman sold his home in Oakland and rented one in Topanga, a wooded canyon enclave contiguous with Los Angeles. When he came back to Stanford, he stayed with Sarah, and when he was in Topanga, Sarah was often with him.

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at night and sometimes start again at two or three in the morning.”

The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that? ” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Sarah was not the only person who experienced the extent of Andrew’s anger. In 2019, Carney sent Huberman materials from his then-forthcoming book, The Wedge, in which Huberman appears. He asked Huberman to confirm the parts in which he was mentioned. For months, Huberman did not respond. Carney sent a follow-up email; if Huberman did not respond, he would assume everything was accurate. In 2020, after months of saying he was too busy to review the materials, Huberman called him and, Carney says, came at him in a rage. “I’ve never had a source I thought was friendly go bananas,” says Carney. Screaming, Huberman threatened to sue and accused Carney of “violating Navy OpSec.”

It had become, by then, one of the most perplexing relationships of Carney’s life. That year, Carney agreed to Huberman’s invitation to swim with sharks on an island off Mexico. First, Carney would have to spend a month of his summer getting certified in Denver. He did, at considerable expense. Huberman then canceled the trip a day before they were set to leave. “I think Andrew likes building up people’s expectations,” says Carney, “and then he actually enjoys the opportunity to pull the rug out from under you.”

In January 2021, Huberman launched his own podcast. Its reputation would be directly tied to his role as teacher and scientist. “I’d like to emphasize that this podcast,” he would say every episode, with his particular combination of formality and discursiveness, “is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.”

“I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that,” Huberman would say on an episode in 2024. “Loneliness,” his interviewee said, “is a need state.” In 2021, the country was in the later stages of a need state: bored, alone, powerless. Huberman offered not only hours of educative listening but a plan to structure your day. A plan for waking. For eating. For exercising. For sleep. At a time when life had shifted to screens, he brought people back to their corporeal selves. He advised a “physiological sigh” — two short breaths in and a long one out — to reduce stress. He pulled countless people from their laptops and put them in rhythm with the sun. “Thank you for all you do to better humanity,” read comments on YouTube. “You may have just saved my life man.” “If Andrew were science teacher for everyone in the world,” someone wrote, “no one would have missed even a single class.”

Asked by Time last year for his definition of fun, Huberman said, “I learn and I like to exercise.” Among his most famous episodes is one in which he declares moderate drinking decidedly unhealthy. As MacKenzie puts it, “I don’t think anybody or anything, including Prohibition, has ever made more people think about alcohol than Andrew Huberman.” While he claims repeatedly that he doesn’t want to “demonize alcohol,” he fails to mask his obvious disapproval of anyone who consumes alcohol in any quantity. He follows a time-restricted eating schedule. He discusses constraint even in joy, because a dopamine spike is invariably followed by a drop below baseline; he explains how even a small pleasure like a cup of coffee before every workout reduces the capacity to release dopamine. Huberman frequently refers to the importance of “social contact” and “peace, contentment, and delight,” always mentioned as a triad; these are ultimately leveraged for the one value consistently espoused: physiological health.

In August 2021, Sarah says she read Andrew’s journal and discovered a reference to cheating. She was, she says, “gutted.” “I hear you are saying you are angry and hurt,” he texted her the same day. “I will hear you as much as long as needed for us.”

Andrew and Sarah wanted children together. Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive naturally; one can exert more control when procreation involves a lab. Sarah began the first of several rounds of IVF. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies that he and Sarah had decided to have children together, clarifying that they “decided to create embryos by IVF.”)

In 2021, she tested positive for a high-risk form of HPV, one of the variants linked to cervical cancer. “I had never tested positive,” she says, “and had been tested regularly for ten years.” (A spokesperson for Huberman says he has never tested positive for HPV. According to the CDC, there is currently no approved test for HPV in men.) When she brought it up, she says, he told her you could contract HPV from many things.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about truth-telling and deception,” Andrew told evolutionary psychologist David Buss on a November 2021 episode of Huberman Lab called “How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term.” They were talking about regularities across cultures in mate preferences.

“Could you tell us,” Andrew asked, “about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?”

“Effective tactics for men,” said a gravel-voiced, 68-year-old Buss, “are often displaying cues to long-term interest … men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings for a woman.”

“Let’s talk about infidelity in committed relationships,” Andrew said, laughing. “I’m guessing it does happen.”

“Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a larger number of affair partners,” said Buss. “And so which then by definition can’t be long-lasting. You can’t,” added Buss wryly, “have the long-term affairs with six different partners.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew, “unless he’s, um,” and here Andrew looked into the distance. “Juggling multiple, uh, phone accounts or something of that sort.”

“Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I think it could be very taxing,” said Buss.

By 2022, Andrew was legitimately famous. Typical headlines read “I tried a Stanford professor’s top productivity routine” and “Google CEO Uses ‘Nonsleep Deep Rest’ to Relax.” Reese Witherspoon told the world that she was sure to get ten minutes of sunlight in the morning and tagged Andrew. When he was not on his own podcast, Andrew was on someone else’s. He kept the place in Topanga, but he and Sarah began splitting rent in Berkeley. In June 2022, they fully combined lives; Sarah relocated her family to Malibu to be with him.

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.”

Sarah was, in fact, changing. She felt herself getting smaller, constantly appeasing. She apologized, again and again and again. “I have been selfish, childish, and confused,” she said. “As a result, I need your protection.” A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.”

The first three rounds of IVF did not produce healthy embryos. In the spring of 2022, enraged again about her past, Andrew asked Sarah to explain in detail what he called her bad choices, most especially having her second child. She wrote it out and read it aloud to him. A spokesperson for Huberman denies this incident and says he does not regard her having a second child as a bad choice.

I think it’s important to recognize that we might have a model of who someone is,” says Dossett, “or a model of how someone should conduct themselves. And if they do something that is out of sync with that model, it’s like, well, that might not necessarily be on that person. Maybe it’s on us. Our model was just off.”

Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process.

Huberman Lab is premised on the image of a working scientist. One imagines clean white counters, rodents in cages, postdocs peering into microscopes. “As scientists,” Huberman says frequently. He speaks often, too, of the importance of mentorship. He “loves” reading teacher evaluations. On the web, one can visit the lab and even donate. I have never met a Huberman listener who doubted the existence of such a place, and this appears to be by design. In a glowing 2023 profile in Stanford magazine, we learn “Everything he does is inspired by this love,” but do not learn that Huberman lives 350 miles and a six-hour drive from Stanford University, making it difficult to drop into the lab. Compounding the issue is the fact that the lab, according to knowledgeable sources, barely exists.

“Is a postdoc working on her own funding, alone, a ‘lab?’” asks a researcher at Stanford. There had been a lab — four rooms on the second floor of the Sherman Fairchild Science Building. Some of them smelled of mice. It was here that researchers anesthetized rodents, injected them with fluorescence, damaged their optic nerves, and watched for the newly bright nerves to grow back.

The lab, says the researcher, was already scaling down before COVID. It was emptying out, postdocs apparently unsupervised, a quarter-million-dollar laser-scanning microscope gathering dust. Once the researcher saw someone come in and reclaim a $3,500 rocker, a machine for mixing solutions.

Shortly before publication, a spokesperson for Stanford said, “Dr. Huberman’s lab at Stanford is operational and is in the process of moving from the Department of Neurobiology to the Department of Ophthalmology,” and a spokesperson for Huberman says the equipment in Dr. Huberman’s lab remained in use until the last postdoc moved to a faculty position.

On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast, Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1 is, according to writer and professional debunker Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the space.” Here we have a powder that contains, according to its own marketing, 75 active ingredients, far more than the typical supplement, which would seem a selling point but for the inconveniences of mass. As performance nutritionist Adam McDonald points out, the vast number of ingredients indicates that each ingredient, which may or may not promote good health in a certain dose, is likely included in minuscule amounts, though consumers are left to do the math themselves; the company keeps many of the numbers proprietary. “We can be almost guaranteed that literally every supplement or ingredient within this proprietary blend is underdosed,” explains McDonald; the numbers, he says, don’t appear to add up to anything research has shown to be meaningful in terms of human health outcomes. And indeed, “the problem with most of the probiotics is they’re typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize,” one learns from Dr. Layne Norton in a November 2022 episode of Huberman Lab. (AG1 argues that probiotics are effective and that the 75 ingredients are “included not only for their individual benefit, but for the synergy between them — how ingredients interact in complex ways, and how combinations can lead to additive effects.”) “That’s the good news about podcasts,” Huberman said when Wendy Zukerman of Science Vs pointed out that her podcast would never make recommendations based on such tenuous research. “People can choose which podcast they want to listen to.”

Whenever Sarah had suspicions about Andrew’s interactions with another woman, he had a particular way of talking about the woman in question. She says he said the women were stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars. He told her that one woman tore out her hair with chunks of flesh attached to it. He told her a story about a woman who fabricated a story about a dead baby to “entrap” him. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies the account of the denigration of women and the dead-baby story and says the hair story was taken out of context.) Most of the time, Sarah believed him; the women probably were crazy. He was a celebrity. He had to be careful.

It was in August 2022 that Sarah noticed she and Andrew could not go out without being thronged by people. On a camping trip in Washington State that same month, Sarah brought syringes and a cooler with ice packs. Every day of the trip, he injected the drugs meant to stimulate fertility into her stomach. This was round four.

Later that month, Sarah says she grabbed Andrew’s phone when he had left it in the bathroom, checked his texts, and found conversations with someone we will call Eve. Some of them took place during the camping trip they had just taken.

“Your feelings matter,” he told Eve on a day when he had injected his girlfriend with hCG. “I’m actually very much a caretaker.” And later: “I’m back on grid tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.”

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,” he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

Sarah noticed how courteous he was with Eve. “So many offers,” she pointed out, “to process and work through things.”

Eve is an ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of woman from whom it is hard to look away. Where Sarah exudes a winsome chaotic energy, Eve is intimidatingly collected. Eve saw Andrew on Raya in 2020 and messaged him on Instagram. They went for a swim in Venice, and he complimented her form. “You’re definitely,” he said, “on the faster side of the distribution.” She found him to be an extraordinary listener, and she liked the way he appeared to be interested in her internal life. He was busy all the time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his dog; responsibilities at Stanford. “I’m willing to do the repair work on this,” he said when she called him out for standing her up, or, “This sucks, but doesn’t deter my desire and commitment to see you, and establish clear lines of communication and trust.” Despite his endless excuses for not showing up, he seemed, to Eve, to be serious about deepening their relationship, which lasted on and off for two years. Eve had the impression that he was not seeing anyone else: She was willing to have unprotected sex.

As their relationship intensified over the years, he talked often about the family he one day wanted. “Our children would be amazing,” he said. She asked for book recommendations and he suggested, jokingly, Huberman: Why We Made Babies. “I’m at the stage of life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her. “That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental question.” One time she heard him say, on Joe Rogan, that he had a girlfriend. She texted him to ask about it, and he responded immediately. He had a stalker, he said, and so his team had decided to invent a partner for the listening public. (“I later learned,” Eve tells me with characteristic equanimity, “that this was not true.”)

In September 2022, Eve noticed that Sarah was looking at her Instagram stories; not commenting or liking, just looking. Impulsively, Eve messaged her. “Is there anything you’d rather ask me directly?” she said. They set up a call. “Fuck you Andrew,” she messaged him.

Sarah moved out in August 2023 but says she remained in a committed relationship with Huberman. (A spokesperson for Huberman says they were separated.) At Thanksgiving that year, she noticed he was “wiggly” every time a cell phone came out at the table — trying to avoid, she suspected, being photographed. She says she did not leave him until December. According to Sarah, the relationship ended, as it had started, with a lie. He had been at her place for a couple of days and left for his place to prepare for a Zoom call; they planned to go Christmas shopping the next day. Sarah showed up at his house and found him on the couch with another woman. She could see them through the window. “If you’re going to be a cheater,” she advises me later, “do not live in a glass house.”

On January 11, a woman we’ll call Alex began liking all of Sarah’s Instagram posts, seven of them in a minute. Sarah messaged her: “I think you’re friends with my ex, Andrew Huberman. Are you one of the woman he cheated on me with?” Alex is an intense, direct, highly educated woman who lives in New York; she was sleeping with Andrew; and she had no idea there had been a girlfriend. “Fuck,” she said. “I think we should talk.” Over the following weeks, Sarah and Alex never stopped texting. “She helped me hold my boundary against him,” says Sarah, “keep him blocked. She said, ‘You need to let go of the idea of him.’” Instead of texting Andrew, Sarah texted Alex. Sometimes they just talked about their days and not about Andrew at all. Sarah still thought beautiful Eve, on the other hand, “might be crazy,” but they talked some more and brought her into the group chat. Soon there were others. There was Mary: a dreamy, charismatic Texan he had been seeing for years. Her friends called Andrew “bread crumbs,” given his tendency to disappear. There was a fifth woman in L.A., funny and fast-talking. Alex had been apprehensive; she felt foolish for believing Andrew’s lies and worried that the other women would seem foolish, therefore compounding her shame. Foolish women were not, however, what she found. Each of the five was assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted; there had been a type, and they were diverse expressions of that type. “I can’t believe how crazy I thought you were,” Mary told Sarah. No one struck anyone else as a stalker. No one had made up a story about a dead baby or torn out hair with chunks in it. “I haven’t slept with anyone but him for six years,” Sarah told the group. “If it makes you feel any better,” Alex joked, “according to the CDC,” they had all slept with one another.

The women compared time-stamped screenshots of texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of deception.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.

They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he met Eve. They had a serious talk about their relationship. They thought they were in a good place. He wanted to make it work.

“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you … For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”

“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.

“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely schedule three Zooms in a day.”

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

“Does Huberman have vices?” asks an anonymous Reddit poster.

“I remember him saying,” reads the first comment, “that he loves croissants.”

While Huberman has been criticized for having too few women guests on his podcast, he is solicitous and deferential toward those he interviews. In a January 2023 episode, Dr. Sara Gottfried argues that “patriarchal messaging” and white supremacy contribute to the deterioration of women’s health, and Andrew responds with a story about how his beloved trans mentor, Ben Barres, had experienced “intense suppression/oppression” at MIT before transitioning. “Psychology is influencing biology,” he says with concern. “And you’re saying these power dynamics … are impacting it.”

In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy. Multiple women recall him saying he preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman was monogamous but the man was not. “He told me,” says Mary, “that what he wanted was a woman who was submissive, who he could slap in the ass in public, and who would be crawling on the floor for him when he got home.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.) The women continued to compare notes. He had his little ways of checking in: “Good morning beautiful.” There was a particular way he would respond to a sexy picture: “Mmmmm hi there.”

A spokesperson for Huberman insisted that he had not been monogamous with Sarah until late 2021, but a recorded conversation he had with Alex suggested that in May of that year he had led Sarah to believe otherwise. “Well, she was under the impression that we were exclusive at that time,” he said. “Women are not dumb like that, dude,” Alex responded. “She was under that impression? Then you were giving her that impression.” Andrew agreed: “That’s what I meant. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on her.”

The kind of women to whom Andrew Huberman was attracted; the kind of women who were attracted to him — these were women who paid attention to what went into their bodies, women who made avoiding toxicity a central focus of their lives. They researched non-hormone-disrupting products, avoided sugar, ate organic. They were disgusted by the knowledge that they had had sex with someone who had an untold number of partners. All of them wondered how many others there were. When Sarah found Andrew with the other woman, there had been a black pickup truck in the driveway, and she had taken a picture. The women traced the plates, but they hit a dead end and never found her.

Tell us about the dark triad,” he had said to Buss in November on the trip in which he slept with Mary.

“The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics,” said Buss. “So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Such people “feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains.” Those “who are high on dark-triad traits,” he said, “tend to be good at the art of seduction.” The vast majority of them were men.

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex addict; he was a love addict. Addiction, Huberman says, “is a progressing narrowing of things that bring you joy.” In August 2021, the same month Sarah first learned of Andrew’s cheating, he released an episode with Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Lembke, the author of a book called Dopamine Nation, gave a clear explanation of the dopaminergic roots of addiction.

“What happens right after I do something that is really pleasurable,” she says, “and releases a lot of dopamine is, again, my brain is going to immediately compensate by downregulating my own dopamine receptors … And that’s that comedown, or the hangover or that aftereffect, that moment of wanting to do it more.” Someone who waits for the feeling to pass, she explained, will reregulate, go back to baseline. “If I keep indulging again and again and again,” she said, “ultimately I have so much on the pain side that I’ve essentially reset my brain to what we call anhedonic or lacking-in-joy type of state, which is a dopamine deficit state.” This is a state in which nothing is enjoyable: “Everything sort of pales in comparison to this one drug that I want to keep doing.”

“Just for the record,” Andrew said, smiling, “Dr. Lembke has … diagnosed me outside the clinic, in a playful way, of being work addicted. You’re probably right!”

Lembke laughed. “You just happen to be addicted,” she said gently, “to something that is really socially rewarded.”

What he failed to understand, he said, was people who ruined their lives with their disease. “I like to think I have the compassion,” he said, “but I don’t have that empathy for taking a really good situation and what from the outside looks to be throwing it in the trash.”

At least three ex-girlfriends remain friendly with Huberman. He “goes deep very quickly,” says Keegan Amit, who dated Andrew from 2010 to 2017 and continues to admire him. “He has incredible emotional capacity.” A high-school girlfriend says both she and he were “troubled” during their time together, that he was complicated and jealous but “a good person” whom she parted with on good terms. “He really wants to get involved emotionally but then can’t quite follow through,” says someone he dated on and off between 2006 and 2010. “But yeah. I don’t think it’s …” She hesitates. “I think he has such a good heart.”

Andrew grew up in Palo Alto just before the dawn of the internet, a lost city. He gives some version of his origin story on The Rich Roll Podcast ; he repeats it for Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. He tells Time magazine and Stanford magazine. “Take the list of all the things a parent shouldn’t do in a divorce,” he recently told Christian bowhunter Cameron Hanes. “They did them all.” “You had,” says Wendy Zukerman in her bright Aussie accent, “a wayward childhood.” “I think it’s very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours,” says Tim Ferriss, “to sort of assume a certain trajectory, right? To assume that it has always come easy.” His father and mother agree that “after our divorce was an incredibly hard time for Andrew,” though they “do not agree” with some of his characterization of his past; few parents want to be accused of “pure neglect.”

Huberman would not provide the name of the detention center in which he says he was held for a month in high school. In a version of the story Huberman tells on Peter Attia’s podcast, he says, “We lost a couple of kids, a couple of kids killed themselves while we were there.” ( New York was unable to find an account of this event.)

Andrew attended Gunn, a high-performing, high-pressure high school. Classmates describe him as always with a skateboard; they remember him as pleasant, “sweet,” and not particularly academic. He would, says one former classmate, “drop in on the half-pipe,” where he was “encouraging” to other skaters. “I mean, he was a cool, individual kid,” says another classmate. “There was one year he, like, bleached his hair and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s cool.’” It was a wealthy place, the kind of setting where the word au pair comes up frequently, and Andrew did not stand out to his classmates as out of control or unpredictable. They do not recall him getting into street fights, as Andrew claims he did. He was, says Andrew’s father, “a little bit troubled, yes, but it was not something super-serious.”

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor.

I have never,” says Amit, “met a man more interested in personal growth.” Andrew’s relationship to therapy remains intriguing. “We were at dinner once,” says Eve, “and he told me something personal, and I suggested he talk to his therapist. He laughed it off like that wasn’t ever going to happen, so I asked him if he lied to his therapist. He told me he did all the time.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.)

“People high on psychopathy are good at deception,” says Buss. “I don’t know if they’re good at self-deception.” With repeated listening to the podcast, one discerns a man undergoing, in public, an effort to understand himself. There are hours of talking about addiction, trauma, dopamine, and fear. Narcissism comes up consistently. One can see attempts to understand and also places where those attempts swerve into self-indulgence. On a recent episode with the Stanford-trained psychiatrist Paul Conti, Andrew and Conti were describing the psychological phenomenon of “aggressive drive.” Andrew had an example to share: He once canceled an appointment with a Stanford colleague. There was no response. Eventually, he received a reply that said, in Andrew’s telling, “Well, it’s clear that you don’t want to pursue this collaboration.”

Andrew was, he said to Conti, “shocked.”

“I remember feeling like that was pretty aggressive,” Andrew told Conti. “It stands out to me as a pretty salient example of aggression.”

“So to me,” said Huberman, “that seems like an example of somebody who has a, well, strong aggressive drive … and when disappointed, you know, lashes back or is passive.”

“There’s some way in which the person doesn’t feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved. So then there is a sense of the need and the right to overcontrol.”

“Sure,” said Huberman.

“And now we’re going to work together, right, so I’m exerting significant control over you, right? And it may be that he’s not aware of it.”

“In this case,” said Andrew, “it was a she.”

This woman, explained Conti, based entirely on Andrew’s description of two emails, had allowed her unhealthy “excess aggression” to be “eclipsing the generative drive.” She required that Andrew “bowed down before” her “in the service of the ego” because she did not feel good about herself.

This conversation extends for an extraordinary nine minutes, both men egging each other on, diagnosis after diagnosis, salient, perhaps, for reasons other than those the two identify. We learn that this person lacks gratitude, generative drive, and happiness; she suffers from envy, low “pleasure drive,” and general unhappiness. It would appear, at a distance, to be an elaborate fantasy of an insane woman built on a single behavior: At some point in time, a woman decided she did not want to work with a man who didn’t show up.

There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others. Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh, employed by this writer many times in the writing of this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the man he continues to be may not even matter to those who buy questionable products he has recommended and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo Alto. The people who definitively find the space between fantasy and reality to be a problem are women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep, sustained concern for their personal growth, and who, in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration, that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to more.

“There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, her voice breaking. “Feeling we had made mistakes. We hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t been communicating. By making these other women into the other, I hadn’t really given space for their hurt. And let it sink in with me that it was so similar to my own hurt.”

Three of the women on the group text met up in New York in February, and the group has only grown closer. On any given day, one of the five can go into an appointment and come back to 100 texts. Someone shared a Reddit thread in which a commenter claimed Huberman had a “stable full a hoes,” and another responded, “I hope he thinks of us more like Care Bears,” at which point they assigned themselves Care Bear names. “Him: You’re the only girl I let come to my apartment,” read a meme someone shared; under it was a yellow lab looking extremely skeptical. They regularly use Andrew’s usual response to explicit photos (“Mmmmm”) to comment on pictures of one another’s pets. They are holding space for other women who might join.

“This group has radicalized me,” Sarah tells me. “There has been so much processing.” They are planning a weekend together this summer.

“It could have been sad or bitter,” says Eve. “We didn’t jump in as besties, but real friendships have been built. It has been, in a strange and unlikely way, quite a beautiful experience.”

Additional reporting by Amelia Schonbek and Laura Thompson.

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A Little Life

By hanya yanagihara, a little life summary and analysis of the postman, chapter 1.

The narrative resumes five years after Jude and Willem moved in together. Jude has a weekly ritual of taking a long walk on Sundays. The two of them still live together, even though their careers have progressed, and they are now much more financially stable. Shortly before Willem's thirtieth birthday, he was cast in a very successful play, and when he was thirty-one, Willem quit his job as a server to devote himself to acting full-time. Jude is two years younger than his friends, so he is about to turn thirty, while the others are thirty-two. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Jude spends his Saturdays tutoring a young boy named Felix. Jude had asked Malcolm's father about possibly introducing him to prospective tutoring clients, fibbing that he is saving up for a down payment. Jude has an awkward relationship with Felix, but he feels affection for the boy, especially when Felix confides in him about his loneliness and lack of friends.

The narrative flashes back to Jude's early years of college when he often felt isolated and different because he lacked the cultural context and childhood stories of the other students. Jude did not feel comfortable confiding in anyone about his own past, although he felt closest to Willem. One night, when the group was gathered together, JB asked Jude directly what happened to his legs. Jude briefly said that he was hurt in a car injury when he was fifteen, and this answer seemed to satisfy his friends. Before Jude started college, he was encouraged by a social worker named Ana . He had met Ana when he woke up in the hospital after his car injury, and she had helped him with the intense initial pain. When Jude was released from the hospital, he entered foster care and remained very close with Ana. She helped him navigate providing evidence against Dr. Traylor and provided him with a tutor so that he could finish high school. She encouraged him to apply to college, and Jude ended up getting accepted with a full scholarship. As Jude prepared to leave for college, he realized that Ana was seriously ill. She encouraged him to talk about his past traumas, and she also told him that he would eventually have to confide in other people. Ana passed away in June, and Jude's foster family moved away in July, so he spent a few months in an emergency shelter before leaving for college in Boston. He arrived at college with everything he owned in a backpack and cultivated a deep sense of shame when he compared himself with the other students.

The narrative flashes back to an experience Jude has when he was in law school and clerked for Judge Sullivan. His professor, Harold, had recommended that Jude apply for the position. At that point, Jude had been working for Harold as a research assistant for two years, and the two of them had become close. Harold even taught Jude how to drive. The day after Jude got an offer for his clerkship, Harold took him to an expensive shop and bought him business clothes. Jude was nervous about the generosity and kindness Harold showed him, but Harold encouraged him to accept whatever kindness he was offered. Jude first met Harold in his first year of law school, when he took a class on contract law. During his time as a law student, Jude simultaneously pursued a Masters at MIT, worked for Harold, worked at the law library, and worked at a bakery. As he and Harold got to know each other better, Harold eventually invited him to dinner where Jude met Harold's wife, Julia . While Jude enjoyed his friendship with Harold, he also found it stressful because Harold wanted to know lots of information about Jude and refused to stop asking questions, even when Jude was evasive. Despite Jude's reservations, he gradually became closer to Harold and Julia, and by the summer after his second year of law school, Jude and his friends spent the weekend at Harold and Julia's house on Cape Cod. Even when Jude moved to Washington, and then New York, he remained close to them.

Jude recalls how crushed he was when he confided to Andy that he hoped his injuries would get better with time and Andy told him that there was no chance of that happening. If anything, Jude is only going to be in more and more pain as he gets older. Andy has promised that he will always treat Jude, and he is the only doctor Jude is willing to see. Andy and Jude have a friendship as well as a professional relationship and Andy even invites Jude to his wedding. Andy regularly lectures Jude about his self-harming and worries about Jude's mental health. Jude, however, refuses to see a psychologist. He regularly suffers from wounds that appear on his legs.

Jude reminisces about his past and early childhood. He was found abandoned at a monastery in South Dakota when he was an infant and was raised by the monks there. He never knew anything about his birth parents, and the monks often scolded and disciplined him harshly. Responding to the lack of affection, Jude became obsessed with stealing small items and was beaten and abused in punishment. As the abuse grew worse, Jude became subject to angry rages. The only monk who seemed to be kind to him was Brother Luke , who was responsible for managing the greenhouse and the garden. One day, Jude followed Brother Luke into the greenhouse. Looking back, he thinks of this as the moment where his life was set on the road to ruin.

The plot of the novel is conveyed in a non-linear fashion, through flashbacks to different points in time. This broken and fragmented structure reflects both Jude's psyche and body: both have been shattered, and neither functions in the smooth, easy way that many individuals take for granted. As a reader, one is never sure where the narrative is going to go next: will it be details of Jude's present-day, increasingly successful life in New York, surrounded by close friends and hopeful prospects? Or, will it be the dark and horrifying details of his abused past? This effect mirrors what Jude experiences. No matter how good his present life is, at any moment he can be transported back into gruesome memories. The flashes into retrospective narration are essential to understanding Jude's relationship to his past trauma. His past is not over: rather, it is perpetually happening to him, alongside whatever he is experiencing in the present. This section also makes it clear that Jude has never been willing to access psychological treatment even though he could readily afford it and Andy urges him to do so. Jude is so ashamed of his past that he cannot bear to talk about it, and ironically, his refusal to share his past makes him even more isolated and ashamed. Ana and Andy (the similarity between their names hints at the parallel roles they play in Jude's life) both responded to Jude's disclosure with empathy and compassion. They did not judge him, and they tried to help him as much as possible. Still, Jude's capacity to trust is so low that he cannot believe that most people would care about him if they knew the truth.

The novel has also revealed a dynamic where Jude's friends (especially Willem) accept him for who he is and love him even though he is often evasive and withholding. This dynamic is demonstrated even more strongly through Jude's relationship with his professor, Harold. Harold's initial interest in Jude hints that Jude is intellectually talented, but the relationship quickly becomes more personal. Harold, like Andy, can recognize Jude's potential and wants to build a connection to him. However, for Harold, trust naturally comes with intimacy. He wants to know Jude's past and aspirations, and he truly cares about Jude without having any agenda of his own. While the love of his friends provides Jude with a certain kind of confidence, the other young men are insecure and still trying to find their own place in the world. They do not have the emotional maturity to nurture Jude because they are still learning about themselves. Harold becomes an important presence in Jude's life because he can truly function as a parental surrogate. He doesn't need anything from Jude: he simply wants to nurture him so that Jude can achieve his full potential in his career and his life.

This section begins to illuminate more about why Jude is so wary and reluctant to trust others. While Willem was orphaned, he at least has memories of his family. Jude is truly unmoored from any kind of family structure and functions almost as a kind of changeling. Jude's friends carelessly comment on his racial ambiguity without realizing that this lack of clear identity reflects the many unknowns in Jude's life. Traditionally, in literature, the orphaned or lost child is often a signifier of potential: they will turn out to be a misplaced prince or have roots in nobility. Alternately, the status as an orphan might allow them to break free of family obligations and rewrite their destiny by achieving social mobility. For Jude, there is nothing magical or promising about his lack of family background. It will always just be a mysterious lack that will make him feel different from those around him, unable to relate to them on a fundamental level.

While Jude's abandonment is the first tragedy in his life, it is far from the last. Again, contrary to literary conventions, Jude is not given a safe and sheltering place in which to grow up. He is made to feel unwanted and unloved from the very first day he can remember. While the abuse at the hands of the monks is relatively mild in comparison to what will come later, it primes Jude for a lifetime of victimhood. Because he is always made to feel like an unwanted burden, Jude never sees himself as worthy of love or respect. When Brother Luke first takes an interest in Jude, Jude is very susceptible to predatory grooming because he is so vulnerable. All he wants is to feel loved by someone, and he trusts Luke completely. The total trust and innocence Jude shows to Luke comes to represent the last time he exhibits these characteristics. In Jude's mind, when he looks back, all of the terrible things that happened to him resulted from the fact that he trusted Luke. With this perspective in mind, it makes sense that he is extremely unwilling to take the risk of trusting anyone else in the future.

At this point in the narrative, details of exactly what happened to Jude remain unclear, which stimulates suspense in the narrative. There is clearly an ominous element to the car accident, but the lack of details creates a sense of mystery and foreboding. Similarly, whatever happened with Brother Luke clearly had negative consequences for Jude, but readers do not yet know what happened. The explanation that the one person with whom Jude had previously felt safe (Ana) died also adds another layer to Jude's inability to trust. While Ana never betrayed Jude, her early death did encourage him to see the world as an unsafe place in which he is always in danger of losing anything he might gain. Ana's death also foreshadows how Jude will eventually lose Willem.

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A Little Life Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for A Little Life is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for A Little Life

A Little Life study guide contains a biography of Hanya Yanagihara, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About A Little Life
A Little Life Summary
Character List

Essays for A Little Life

A Little Life essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.

Stigma of Dependence: Character Analysis in Three Recent Novels

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How I Wrote My Novel: Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life
Boys in the Band by Geoffrey Chadsey, 2006. Photo: Courtesy of Geoffrey Chadsey. I wrote my second novel, A Little Life, in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to ...
A Little Life Essay Questions
A Little Life study guide contains a biography of Hanya Yanagihara, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.
The Meaning of Life and Death in the Novel "A Little Life": [Essay
Life: A Journey of Pain and Suffering. In "A Little Life," life is portrayed as a relentless journey fraught with pain and suffering. Jude St. Francis, a central character, experiences unimaginable trauma and abuse during his early years, leaving deep emotional and physical scars that shape his entire existence. His traumatic upbringing fundamentally influences his sense of self-worth ...
A Little Life: Study Guide
Overview. Published in 2015, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life tells the story of four college friends and centers on Jude St. Francis, a fragile, brilliant young man who suffers inconceivable trauma yet continues to find reasons for happiness. This epic novel examines sexual abuse, addiction, sexuality, the complicated nature of love, and the ...
A Little Life Essay Topics
2. A Little Life is an extremely male-focused story. While Jude has a few female friends and an adoptive mother, these characters are not developed at all. The one female character we see interact with Jude extensively, Ana, dies soon after she is introduced. Imagine that one of the female characters in the story is a more significant character ...
A Little Life Study Guide
A Little Life also shares some similarities with Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov's infamous novel is narrated (unreliably) by "Humbert Humbert," (a pseudonym) a loathsome pedophile who gradually becomes obsessed with the 12-year-old daughter of his landlady, Charlotte Haze. After Charlotte's sudden death, Humbert kidnaps Lolita and ...
A Little Life Summary
A Little Life explores the tragic life of Jude St. Francis. The plot is conveyed through flashbacks and retrospective narration. Jude is abandoned at a monastery in South Dakota as an infant and raised by the priests there. They are generally cruel and abusive towards him, and when one priest, Brother Luke, takes a special interest in him, Jude ...
A Little Life: why everyone should read this modern-day classic
It may be dark and traumatic, but Hanya Yanagihara's second novel offers a refreshingly modern take on friendship in the age of anxiety. Brigid Delaney. Tue 19 Jan 2016 17.42 EST. Last modified ...
A Little Life: Themes
In a world where abuse, pedophilia, and cruelty abound, life feels improbable, and the idea of a safe, content, or happy life seems absurd. Nevertheless, these young men persist when confronted with trauma, racism, and other challenges. In the competitive New York professional context, from varying family backgrounds that each pose their own ...
A Little Life The Happy Years Summary and Analysis
A Little Life Summary and Analysis of The Happy Years. Summary. The narrative resumes from Willem's perspective. Willem reminisces about realizing that he had become truly famous in his late thirties, finally achieving a sense of confidence about his film career. He then reflects on his experiences in the months when he stayed with Jude after ...
A Little Life Essay Topics & Writing Assignments
Essay Topic 4. Discuss Yanigihara's reasons for including instances of foreshadowing within the novel and how the use of foreshadowing connects with the narrative's themes and messages. Essay Topic 5. Look carefully at the passages of A Little Life that describe the close relationship between Willem and Jude.
Review: 'A Little Life' By Hanya Yanagihara : NPR
This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience. As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night. The ...
Essays on A Little Life
1 page / 525 words. Introduction Jude St. Francis is the protagonist of Hanya Yanagihara's bestselling novel "A Little Life". The significance of friendship and love in his life life serves as a central theme that permeates the narrative. Jude's relationships with his college friends - Malcolm, JB, and Willem... A Little Life.
A Little Life : The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here
Hanya Yanagihara's novel is an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America. By Garth Greenwell. David K. Wheeler. May 31, 2015. In a 2013 essay for Salon, the culture writer ...
The Use of Symbolism and Imagery in "A Little Life"
The novel "A Little Life", written by Hanya Yanagihara, is a masterful work that employs symbolism and imagery to convey the deep and complex themes of trauma, suffering, identity, and the search for meaning. Throughout the novel, various symbols and images are used to provide insight into the characters' internal struggles and the profound ...
A Little Life Essays
A Little Life. In recent years, the age of maturity in Western cultures has been pushed higher and higher as more education becomes necessary to pursue job opportunities. Crashing economies increasingly force children to rely on their parents after graduation.... A Little Life essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written ...
A Little Life Themes
Get unlimited access to SuperSummaryfor only $0.70/week. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
A Little Life Themes
Success and Happiness. A Little Life follows four close friends ( Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB) as they graduate from college and move to New York in pursuit of fame, success, and wealth. The friends are all ambitious and talented, and over the course of the novel, each achieves great success in his chosen field ( Jude is a lawyer, Willem is ...
Friendship and Human Connection Theme in A Little Life
A Little Life may be brutal in its depiction of abuse, pain, and human suffering—but it is not relentless. As often as the novel subjects Jude to physical and psychological torture, it also grants him temporary relief in the happy moments he shares with his friends. Jude, Malcolm, JB, and Willem meet and form a close bond in college, and their friendship endures, deepens, and evolves as they ...
A Little Life Themes
A Little Life study guide contains a biography of Hanya Yanagihara, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.
The Hanya Yanagihara Principle
A Little Life was rightly called a love story; what critics missed was that its author is one of the lovers. This is Yanagihara's principle: If true misery exists, then so might true love. That ...
A Little Life Study Guide
A Little Life was written by Hanya Yanagihara and was published in March 2015 by Doubleday. A Little Life is Yanagihara's second novel, and due to the difficult subject matter, neither the author nor editor predicted that the novel would be popular. Nonetheless, it received very strong critical reviews and a positive response from readers. The novel was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker ...
Who Is Podcast Guest Turned Star Andrew Huberman, Really?
Stanford's Andrew Huberman rose to prominence as a guest on the shows of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Rich Roll, and others. His podcast, Huberman Lab, has millions of followers. But his former ...
A Little Life The Postman, Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis
A Little Life Summary and Analysis of The Postman, Chapter 1. Summary. The narrative resumes five years after Jude and Willem moved in together. Jude has a weekly ritual of taking a long walk on Sundays. The two of them still live together, even though their careers have progressed, and they are now much more financially stable.

A Little Life: why everyone should read this modern-day classic

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A Little Life

A Little Life : The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here

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