“A Little Life”

When I feel choked up with an emotional backlog that I can’t seem to release, I bust out this book, “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara. You’ve no doubt seen this book and it’s polarizing effect on people. It’s either beloved or besotted with little gray area. And the harshest critics are not wrong; this story is relentlessly heartbreaking, viscerally & emotionally violent and will have you sobbing until you heave more than 5 times from start to finish. Those are the precise reasons I love it.

This book has many themes: queerness, family, trauma, abuse, drug addiction, love and friendship. To me, the primary thread of this book is grief: all the ways we grieve, how grief is embodied, where grief lives within us, the bonds strengthened and tested through grief, the brokenness and wholeness that grief simultaneously offer us. This is a book of grief.

As those of us who tend our grief are painfully aware, grief can bring us to the quietest places of our selves. Grief can also pierce that utter void with brilliant light. Grief is both. Grief is yes and … as this book beautifully illustrates.

Need a good sob? Want to get lost in a micro world between two book covers? Want to explore the ways we grieve our own lives in the midst of living them? Feeling isolated in your brokenness? Hope to remember how truly connected we are, even if we don’t acknowledge it? Pick this one up but be warned: this book isn’t straightforward and could take you weeks to years to get through it (it’s 700+ pages), you’ll stop constantly and marvel at the pure beauty and eloquence of what you’ve just learned even as your heart throbs, you probably want to prepare and buy some Kleenex at Costco and last, you will be forever changed by what you learn about yourself and the world from this experience. But then, all the same could be said for grief.