I vaguely remember reading this book. It was really well written but even then I thought it felt too much like "trauma porn". Personally, I find repeated sexual abuse in fiction to be quite off putting.
I don't really mind so much that Yanigihara is a woman. The whole point of fiction is that writers imagine the lives of people who are different from themselves. But the book was so unrelentingly tragic. In that way, it fed into stereotypes that queer stories are inevitably tragic.
I agree—it’s beautifully written but exhausting in its misery. The issue isn’t that she imagined lives unlike her own, it’s that those imagined lives became the queer story mainstream readers embraced. When tragedy is the only note the culture amplifies, it stops feeling like empathy and starts feeling like expectation.
Wow. Lots of comments below by people who haven't read it. Caleb, I respect you, but I disagree with your premise that a straight (or straightish or whatever) Asian woman can't write about gay men. Note that one of the main characters, one of the four, doesn't identify as being gay. He just loves one of the other men, deeply.
It's fiction. Fiction is fiction. We get to make things up, to imagine. I write about straight people all the time. I'm gay. Does that make my POV about straight people invalid? I've spent a lifetime observing them.
You said in your opening paragraph that after you finished the audiobook and you found it it wasn't based on anything, that it was made up--then you stopped feeling "reverence"--which is how you described feeling before you knew that factoid. That's confusing to me. Not all fiction needs to be drawn solely, or even partially, on the authors racial, gender, sexual identification, as it seems like you're suggesting. She's telling a story. The story has characters. Add plot. But the germ of fiction is in the imagination.
I remember being in the audience at a screening of The Kids Are Alright by queer filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko. In the Q&A someone took issue with the fact that one of the lesbian characters slept with a man. They challenged the *politics* of that choice. Cholodenko said (paraphrasing), "Hey I just set out to tell a story about these particular character. It's not my job as a filmmaker to advance any particular point of view or agenda. I'm just telling a story."
Maybe we can agree to disagree. I found the book profoundly moving, and however she came across these characters--maybe by direct observation of people she knew, maybe composite, maybe in a fever dream, or maybe just wholly fabricated; it doesn't matter to me.
I actually liked the book, and I think a lot of the praise is deserved. The writing is incredible and the emotional intensity is undeniable. My critique isn’t about its quality so much as its context—who gets to write the big queer stories that end up defining us to the broader culture, and why those stories so often center on extreme suffering.
So yes, fiction is fiction, and Yanagihara told the story she wanted to tell. I’m just interested in how quickly outsider-authored queer tragedy gets embraced as “representative,” while queer authors writing from lived experience often don’t get the same platform.
We can absolutely disagree about the book itself. I’m just tracing the ecosystem it landed in.
Actually I do agree with you strongly on one point. It's a common trope in any film featuring an LGBTQ character for that character to die. You can almost count on it. And it's *especially* true if there are two characters--one will always die, oftentimes both, and, again, *especially* if they are in a loving relationship. Now what gets interesting is if you ask yourself the question, when you see it, "did this actually advance the plot or did it just happen?" Usually it's the latter. More interesting still is how often this happens in movies made even by queer filmmakers. Sitting through decades of the San Francisco Int'l LGBTQ festival demonstrated this for me time and time again.
I don't pretend I'm the first to observe this trope. In fact I first heard about it from Vito Russo who wrote The Celluloid Closet. I heard him lecture in the 90s and he mentioned it, and it's in his book. Since then there have been PhD dissertations that quantified the trend, and it's commonly recognized, and now named Bury Your Gays if you want to google it :-)
So yes, you're right: straight artists should lay off the death and dying when representing gay characters.
This is exactly the pattern I was pointing toward. Queer tragedy exists in every era and every medium, and as you said, even queer filmmakers end up reproducing it—we’ve all been shaped by the same narrative gravity.
My point with A Little Life isn’t “outsiders can’t write queer characters.” It’s that when an outsider writes into an already-oversaturated pattern of queer pain, the culture often treats it as definitive or profound, rather than noticing it as one more iteration of a trope we keep rehearsing.
You’re totally right that the Bury Your Gays trope is real and deeply documented. I’m interested in why the same narrative themes—death, tragedy, self-destruction—get elevated and awarded when they’re delivered from a comfortable distance, and why stories of queer interiority told from within often don’t get the same lift.
We’re actually agreeing more than we’re disagreeing. I’m just trying to push on the ecosystem that keeps rewarding one kind of queer story over all the others.
Oh, and until recently, Bomer wasn't the narrator of A Little Life. this was recently re-recorded in 2025 (the original narrator was exclusively available on Audible and it was Oliver Wyman).
I also have a suspicion that Hanya is queer but doesn't want to disclose her personal identity. I interviewed her a few years ago and tried to get her to talk about it. Her book 'To Paradise' isn't trauma porn but the middle section has an amazing depiction of gay men and their love lives that I can't imagine someone who is not an "insider" could write so well: https://www.audible.com/blog/hanya-yanagihara-on-why-our-longing-for-paradise-will-forever-disappoint
Good catch, Jerry. I’ve seen different versions of the story about who’s in that Hujar photo—part of me liked the tidy version I shared here. I came to A Little Life completely blind; had Audible not suggested it, I probably never would’ve picked it up—which says something about how it was being marketed. The switch to Matt Bomer only reinforces that. Whether Hanya meant to or not, the book found its audience as a gay story. I haven’t read her other work, but now you’ve got me curious.
Reading your interview, I suppose this is the part that infuriates me:
“Having said that, I think that there is no single representation of any community. If I write something from the perspective of an Asian woman, I have no more or less validity or legitimacy than anybody who’s writing from that perspective—including people who belong to those communities.”
To me, that sounds tone-deaf. The validity or legitimacy she dismisses would not be distributed evenly across authors. A handful of voices are permitted to cross boundaries freely, while others are still told to stay in their lane.
Totally. She's a slippery one. Brilliant minds know how to dodge better than others. I should also note: I have never read A Little Life. In fact, I actively avoided it when it came out because I've learned that, with a book with so much hype and adulation (this includes such books as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), it's better for me to let that die down so I'm not knee-jerk reacting negatively.
But with Little Life, the repulsion by actual gay men to the book was so intense, I've stayed away even longer—especially since it was mainly young straight women who seemed have a kink for crying about Jude's abuses. So your critique feels especially spot on, but I can't say for myself since I still haven't read or listened. I have read plenty about it, including this excellent piece by Parul Seghal that seems to confirm all the trauma plot issues https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot
I haven't read it yet, but this Summer I saw A Little Life in a bookstore with another book next to it - Tin Man by Sarah Winman. It had a Staff Recommendation next to it basically saying read this instead of Little Life. Of course it had something witty underneath it saying half as much trauma and 75% shorter - something like that.
I vaguely remember reading this book. It was really well written but even then I thought it felt too much like "trauma porn". Personally, I find repeated sexual abuse in fiction to be quite off putting.
I don't really mind so much that Yanigihara is a woman. The whole point of fiction is that writers imagine the lives of people who are different from themselves. But the book was so unrelentingly tragic. In that way, it fed into stereotypes that queer stories are inevitably tragic.
I agree—it’s beautifully written but exhausting in its misery. The issue isn’t that she imagined lives unlike her own, it’s that those imagined lives became the queer story mainstream readers embraced. When tragedy is the only note the culture amplifies, it stops feeling like empathy and starts feeling like expectation.
Wow. Lots of comments below by people who haven't read it. Caleb, I respect you, but I disagree with your premise that a straight (or straightish or whatever) Asian woman can't write about gay men. Note that one of the main characters, one of the four, doesn't identify as being gay. He just loves one of the other men, deeply.
It's fiction. Fiction is fiction. We get to make things up, to imagine. I write about straight people all the time. I'm gay. Does that make my POV about straight people invalid? I've spent a lifetime observing them.
You said in your opening paragraph that after you finished the audiobook and you found it it wasn't based on anything, that it was made up--then you stopped feeling "reverence"--which is how you described feeling before you knew that factoid. That's confusing to me. Not all fiction needs to be drawn solely, or even partially, on the authors racial, gender, sexual identification, as it seems like you're suggesting. She's telling a story. The story has characters. Add plot. But the germ of fiction is in the imagination.
I remember being in the audience at a screening of The Kids Are Alright by queer filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko. In the Q&A someone took issue with the fact that one of the lesbian characters slept with a man. They challenged the *politics* of that choice. Cholodenko said (paraphrasing), "Hey I just set out to tell a story about these particular character. It's not my job as a filmmaker to advance any particular point of view or agenda. I'm just telling a story."
Maybe we can agree to disagree. I found the book profoundly moving, and however she came across these characters--maybe by direct observation of people she knew, maybe composite, maybe in a fever dream, or maybe just wholly fabricated; it doesn't matter to me.
I actually liked the book, and I think a lot of the praise is deserved. The writing is incredible and the emotional intensity is undeniable. My critique isn’t about its quality so much as its context—who gets to write the big queer stories that end up defining us to the broader culture, and why those stories so often center on extreme suffering.
So yes, fiction is fiction, and Yanagihara told the story she wanted to tell. I’m just interested in how quickly outsider-authored queer tragedy gets embraced as “representative,” while queer authors writing from lived experience often don’t get the same platform.
We can absolutely disagree about the book itself. I’m just tracing the ecosystem it landed in.
Actually I do agree with you strongly on one point. It's a common trope in any film featuring an LGBTQ character for that character to die. You can almost count on it. And it's *especially* true if there are two characters--one will always die, oftentimes both, and, again, *especially* if they are in a loving relationship. Now what gets interesting is if you ask yourself the question, when you see it, "did this actually advance the plot or did it just happen?" Usually it's the latter. More interesting still is how often this happens in movies made even by queer filmmakers. Sitting through decades of the San Francisco Int'l LGBTQ festival demonstrated this for me time and time again.
I don't pretend I'm the first to observe this trope. In fact I first heard about it from Vito Russo who wrote The Celluloid Closet. I heard him lecture in the 90s and he mentioned it, and it's in his book. Since then there have been PhD dissertations that quantified the trend, and it's commonly recognized, and now named Bury Your Gays if you want to google it :-)
So yes, you're right: straight artists should lay off the death and dying when representing gay characters.
This is exactly the pattern I was pointing toward. Queer tragedy exists in every era and every medium, and as you said, even queer filmmakers end up reproducing it—we’ve all been shaped by the same narrative gravity.
My point with A Little Life isn’t “outsiders can’t write queer characters.” It’s that when an outsider writes into an already-oversaturated pattern of queer pain, the culture often treats it as definitive or profound, rather than noticing it as one more iteration of a trope we keep rehearsing.
You’re totally right that the Bury Your Gays trope is real and deeply documented. I’m interested in why the same narrative themes—death, tragedy, self-destruction—get elevated and awarded when they’re delivered from a comfortable distance, and why stories of queer interiority told from within often don’t get the same lift.
We’re actually agreeing more than we’re disagreeing. I’m just trying to push on the ecosystem that keeps rewarding one kind of queer story over all the others.
Quick fact check note: That person in the Peter Hujar photo is not David Wojnarowicz (although they obviously had a close relationship). It's an unidentified friend. Hujar had a series of these photos https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/peter-hujar-s-orgasmic-man-at-masculinities-liberation-through-photography-barbican-art-gallery-barbican-centre/MAHbIOxna1WHgA?hl=en
Oh, and until recently, Bomer wasn't the narrator of A Little Life. this was recently re-recorded in 2025 (the original narrator was exclusively available on Audible and it was Oliver Wyman).
I also have a suspicion that Hanya is queer but doesn't want to disclose her personal identity. I interviewed her a few years ago and tried to get her to talk about it. Her book 'To Paradise' isn't trauma porn but the middle section has an amazing depiction of gay men and their love lives that I can't imagine someone who is not an "insider" could write so well: https://www.audible.com/blog/hanya-yanagihara-on-why-our-longing-for-paradise-will-forever-disappoint
Good catch, Jerry. I’ve seen different versions of the story about who’s in that Hujar photo—part of me liked the tidy version I shared here. I came to A Little Life completely blind; had Audible not suggested it, I probably never would’ve picked it up—which says something about how it was being marketed. The switch to Matt Bomer only reinforces that. Whether Hanya meant to or not, the book found its audience as a gay story. I haven’t read her other work, but now you’ve got me curious.
Reading your interview, I suppose this is the part that infuriates me:
“Having said that, I think that there is no single representation of any community. If I write something from the perspective of an Asian woman, I have no more or less validity or legitimacy than anybody who’s writing from that perspective—including people who belong to those communities.”
To me, that sounds tone-deaf. The validity or legitimacy she dismisses would not be distributed evenly across authors. A handful of voices are permitted to cross boundaries freely, while others are still told to stay in their lane.
Totally. She's a slippery one. Brilliant minds know how to dodge better than others. I should also note: I have never read A Little Life. In fact, I actively avoided it when it came out because I've learned that, with a book with so much hype and adulation (this includes such books as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), it's better for me to let that die down so I'm not knee-jerk reacting negatively.
But with Little Life, the repulsion by actual gay men to the book was so intense, I've stayed away even longer—especially since it was mainly young straight women who seemed have a kink for crying about Jude's abuses. So your critique feels especially spot on, but I can't say for myself since I still haven't read or listened. I have read plenty about it, including this excellent piece by Parul Seghal that seems to confirm all the trauma plot issues https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot
I haven't read it yet, but this Summer I saw A Little Life in a bookstore with another book next to it - Tin Man by Sarah Winman. It had a Staff Recommendation next to it basically saying read this instead of Little Life. Of course it had something witty underneath it saying half as much trauma and 75% shorter - something like that.