A Little Life

“He [Malcolm] made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), his sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain).

This early passage displays the trick of Part 1. In Part 1, in which the narration occurs only through JB’s, Willem’s, and Malcolm’s points of view, the narrative feels like a typical tale of young adulthood in New York City. Malcolm’s insecurities about his identity embody the themes usually found in such stories. As readers move through Part 2 and beyond, however, they slowly see realize that this novel will depart from typical coming-of-age tales both by focusing on intensely, almost unbelievably traumatic content and by featuring a protagonist who undergoes no fundamental transformation of character.

“He [Willem] felt he always knew who and what he was […] 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.” 

Willem and Jude share an internalization of imposter syndrome in their respective fields, even as they begin to achieve success. Although Jude has much more trauma in his past than Willem, neither comes from a wealthy or loving home. While they may be bound to some extent by Willem’s compulsion to care for Jude, they are also bound by these shared experiences and shared humility.

“We never see him [Jude] with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past. […] The post-man. Jude the Postman.” 

JB casually articulates this characterization while the novel’s core quartet are in their college years, meaning it not as an insult but merely as an observation. However, it hurts Jude, who puts great effort into fitting in despite his traumatic childhood. His reticence to share any of his own biography intrudes upon his friendships, creating unwanted distance between him and his loved ones.

“At the home, he [Jude] had quickly learned there were three types of boys: The first type might cause the fight (this was JB). The second type wouldn’t join in, but wouldn’t run to get help, either (this was Malcolm). And the third type would actually try to help you out (this was the rarest type, and this was obviously Willem).” 

Jude’s observations about his three closest friends during their college years aptly summarizes the personas the three men continue to inhabit for the rest of the book. JB demonstrates impressive personal growth but remains the most likely of the four to provoke. When chasms open up in the friendship, with JB on one side and Jude and Willem on the other, Malcolm inhabits an uncomfortable middle ground between the factions. Willem remains Jude’s staunchest protector and closest confidante.

“For the first time, he [Jude] was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him anyway, and that as disappointing as it might be, it was inevitable as well, and that life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would.” 

Jude’s meditations on JB’s choice to violate an agreement the two men had by painting Jude without pre-clearing the specific image with Jude first reveal two interesting facets of Jude’s psyche. First, the unnamed “one person” can only allude to Willem, revealing that Jude has finally learned to put complete trust in at least one person. Second, he is nevertheless slow to understand degrees of betrayal—that a meaningful attempt to make amends from JB might indicate that JB still deserves trust despite a mistake in judgment.

“The only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and then to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But best, as well.” 

Jude offers his reflections on friendship to a young boy he tutors, Felix. Because this sentiment comes at the end of Part 2, the reader might think that Jude is well-positioned to enter Part 3 with these ideas in mind and therefore ready to start a new period of increased trust and willingness to accept other people’s high evaluations of his character. However, this sentiment remains purely cognitive for Jude, never saturating his emotional life or helping him stop his cycle of hateful self-talk.

“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”

Willem’s thoughts on the value of friendship serve as one of the book’s thesis statements. Most of the novel’s main characters are childless, and many are unmarried, but they do not find their lives empty or unmeaningful. Their friendships create a chosen family, and Jude’s friends’ devotion to him through years of physical and emotional turmoil shows that such bonds can be every bit as powerful as blood relation or romantic partnerships.

“How could he [Jude] tell Harold that he dreamed not of marriage, or children, but that he would someday have enough money to pay someone to take care of him if he needed it, someone who would be kind to him and allow him privacy and dignity? And then, yes, there were the things he wanted: He wanted to live somewhere where the elevator worked. He wanted to take cabs when he wanted to. He wanted to find somewhere private to swim, because the motion stilled his back and because he wasn’t able to take his walks any longer.”

One of the novel’s most urgent insights is that people without disabilities living in an ableist society are slow to understand how many logistical and financial concerns people with disabilities must navigate. Jude’s adoptive father, Harold, questions Jude’s decision to work for a corporate law firm rather than continue his life of public service, but Jude does not have the luxury of considering his principles alone. He must plan financially for a near-certain future in which his mobility is severely limited.

“But he [Malcolm] and his friends have no children, and in their absence, the world sprawls before them, almost stifling in its possibilities. Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself, and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity, of perpetual doubt.” 

While A Little Life maintains that a life without marriage or children can be profoundly meaningful, Yanagihara also recognizes that society’s norms around the meaning of “adulthood” can create feelings of insecurity in the childless. Malcolm, one of the characters most prone to measuring his life against common social goalposts, feels this insecurity keenly. Even he, however, ultimately decides with his wife to forego having children. Through moments like this and through Jude’s abandonment and traumatic childhood, the novel implies that child-rearing is not for everyone and should not be entered into merely to satisfy social convention.

“He [Jude] had wanted to vanish, then, to close his eyes and reel back time, back to before he had ever met Caleb. […] he would have kept living his little life; he would have never known the difference.” 

In this passage that includes the novel’s title, Caleb has just told Jude that he may not have started dating him had he known that Jude was disabled when they met. This comment triggers Jude’s response of wanting to shrink and recede, to circumscribe his own hopes with even more rigorous modesty. However, Jude’s description of his own life differs dramatically from the life the book depicts—not least because of the novel’s imposing length—which is not “little” at all, but rather almost impossibly large in its highs and lows.

“‘I want to keep seeing you,’ he [Caleb] said, at last. ‘But—but I can’t be around these accessories to weakness, to disease. I just can’t. I hate it. It embarrasses me. It makes me feel—not depressed, but furious like I need to fight against it.’ He paused again. ‘I just didn’t know that’s who you were when I met you,’ he said at last. ‘I thought I could be okay with it. But I’m not sure I can.’” 

While most of the novel shows Jude surrounded by loving, supportive friends in his adult life, Caleb, his first romantic partner, severely undercuts his emotional progress by confirming all of Jude’s worst ideas about himself—most importantly, that he is physically repulsive and inspires contempt. While Caleb excuses his disgusted reaction to Jude’s disability by explaining that he felt his own parents “gave up” when they became ill, this fact does not excuse his cruelty. Although it lasts for only four months, Jude’s encounter with Caleb, who eventually grows extraordinarily abusive, haunts him for the rest of his life, leaving him certain that the best emotion he can ever hope to inspire in another person is pity.

“The person I was will always be the person I am, he [Jude] realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in his apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated.” 

Jude’s internal logic remains consistent throughout the course of the book. The purest expression of that logic is this passage: that he is fundamentally unlovable, that he always has been, and that he always will be. Anyone who tells him otherwise, he assumes, is lying out of pity. While his professional success and loving friends may have been making a dent in helping him believe otherwise before he met Caleb, Caleb’s abuse reinforces all of his worst assumptions.

“He [Jude] was always lying to Willem: big lies, small lies. Their entire relationship was a lie—Willem thought he was one person, and really, he wasn’t. Only Caleb knew the truth. Only Caleb knew what he was.” 

Jude is right that keeping his biography a secret damages his relationships, but not for the reason he thinks. He assumes one day the truth will come out and everyone he loves will think him disgusting. In reality, however, the secret only harms him by creating distance between himself and his loved ones. His closest confidantes often feel hurt, even while sympathizing with him, that he does not seem to trust them with his life story.

“In his [Jude’s] new life, he promised himself, he would be less demanding of his friends; he would be more generous. Whatever they wanted, he would give them. If Willem wanted information, he could have it, and it was up to him to figure out how to give it to him. He would be hurt again and again—everyone was—but if he was going to try, if he was going to be alive, he had to be tougher, he had to prepare himself, he had to accept that this was part of the bargain of life itself.” 

Another manifestation of Jude’s childlike logic occurs in the things he thinks he owes his friends. When he begins a romantic relationship with Willem, for instance, he feels that he owes Willem both information and sex. He fails to realize that these two categories are not the same—that emotional honesty may be a fair requirement for a relationship but that sex should never be something he feels he must do contrary to his wishes. Because his childhood was so inflected by manipulation and coercion around sex, he struggles mightily with appropriate boundaries, sometimes demanding boundaries that are far too rigid and sometimes surrendering boundaries that he needs to feel safe.

“Luke’s legacies were in everything he [Jude] did, in everything he was: his love of reading, of music, of math, of gardening, of languages—those were Luke. His cutting, his hatred, his shame, his fears, his diseases, his inability to have a normal sex life, to be a normal person—those were Luke, too. Luke taught him how to find pleasure in life, and he had removed pleasure absolutely.” 

While Dr. Traylor gives Jude a lifetime of physical disability, it is Brother Luke who poisons his ability to trust most profoundly. In contrast to Dr. Traylor, who never bothers to cultivate a relationship with Jude prior to abusing him, Brother Luke spends months grooming Jude and providing a solace from all the other, more cruel monks at the monastery, even increasing Jude’s confidence by praising his talents and intelligence. His eventual betrayal of this trust is the action most responsible for Jude’s lifelong inability to trust anyone to love him unconditionally.

“Somehow in the past seven months he [Willem] had decided that he was going to repair Jude, that he was going to fix him, when really, he didn’t need fixing. Jude had always taken him at face value; he needed to try to do the same for him.”

Willem’s thoughts about how he can best help Jude exist in a complicated grey area, both right and wrong. On one hand, a relationship where one participant makes it their primary job to “fix” the other is indeed doomed to failure. On the other hand, however, Jude does need help with his lifelong habits of self-harm, and Willem’s tendency is to avoid thinking about how serious this problem is, instead opting for a too-sunny view of the situation.

“They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.” 

In this passage narrated from Jude’s perspective, the reader sees that he considers his self-harm in the same category as his friends’ artistic expression or relationships. He fails to understand that continual harm to his own body is not the same as his friends’ creative outlets. While he is right to see the necessity of coping mechanisms as a trait common across humanity, he is too quick to justify his own damaging coping mechanism.

“If you ruin this, Jude—if you keep lying to someone who loves you, who really loves you, who has only ever wanted to see you exact as you are—then you will only have yourself to blame. It will be your fault. And it’ll be your fault not because of who you are or what you look like, but because of how you behave, because you won’t trust Willem enough to talk to him honestly, to extend to him the same sort of generosity and faith that he has always, always extended to you. I know you think you’re sparing him, but you’re not. You’re selfish. You’re selfish and you’re stubborn and you’re proud and you’re going to ruin the best thing that has happened to you. Don’t you understand that?” 

Andy’s admonishment to Jude when Jude fails to tell Willem about a particularly grisly instance of self-harm marks an important moment for the reader: It gives the reader permission to identify faults in Jude. Because Jude’s childhood is almost unbearably tragic, many readers, exactly like the novel’s characters, may wonder if they can justifiably feel frustrated at some of Jude’s patterns of behavior or if he must be met only with empathy at every turn. Here, however, Andy articulates that Jude, though a tragic figure, is not a saint, like his namesake: He is a person with strengths and flaws like any other. As such, his stubbornness and pride are available for identification and criticism, especially when they adversely affect the people who go to great lengths to care for him.

“Patience; stubbornness; love: he [Willem] had to believe these would be enough. He had to believe that they would be stronger than any habit of Jude’s, no matter how long or diligently practiced.” 

Willem makes the mistake that so many people who care for victims of abuse make: He believes that the strength of his love is enough to heal his partner. Although Willem’s love does come the closest of anyone’s in the novel to accomplishing this goal, it ultimately fails. The novel does not posit a clear answer to what, if anything, could have healed Jude instead, but it does suggest that love alone cannot solve all problems, no matter how generous and sincere it may be.

“Every year, his own good fortunes multiplied and intensified, and he was astonished again and again by the things and generosities that were bequeathed to him, by the people who entered his life, people so different from the people he had known that they seemed to be from a different species altogether. […] sometimes it would seem like life had not just compensated for itself but had done so extravagantly, as if his very life was begging him to forgive it, as if it were piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn’t resent it, so he would allow it to keep moving him forward.” 

Although Jude has the most traumatic backstory of anyone in the novel, his good fortune in adulthood is matched by his entire friend group. Willem is an actor who achieves both critical praise and popular acclaim; Malcolm is an internationally sought-after architect; JB is a respected artist whose paintings hang in the country’s most prestigious galleries. The uncanny success of the friend group matches Jude’s traumatic childhood in pitch: The highs are as high as the lows are low. These extremes contribute to a strange blending of tone in the novel, which is at once both naturalistic and fantasy-like.

“But now they [Jude and Willem] were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.” 

When Willem and Jude first transition from a friendship to a romantic partnership, Jude is distressed by how much he hates having sex, even with someone he loves as much as Willem. Once Willem realizes this and assures Jude that sex does not have to be a part of their relationship, however, the two are able to negotiate a relationship not dictated by society’s standards. Through them, Yanagihara suggests that not all relationships need to follow the same rules to be healthy and loving.

“There is something very wrong with the world, he [Jude] thinks, a world in which of the four of them—him, JB, Willem, and Malcolm—the two best people, the two kindest and most thoughtful, have died, and the two poorer examples of humanity have survived. At least JB is talented; he deserves to live. But he can think of no reason why he might.”

This late-in-the-novel thought about JB shows that while Jude is extremely kind and generous through much of the book, he does have a hardness of heart toward JB that he is unwilling to surrender. Jude’s protective armor makes it impossible for him to ever fully trust someone who wounds him, as JB does about halfway through the novel. As understandable as this trait may be, it does not always serve him well, such as when he refuses to take solace in a friend like JB despite the fact that JB is worlds away from his childhood betrayers and goes to great lengths to make amends.

“The same cycle, the same circle, again and again and again, a churn as predictable as the men in the motel rooms coming in, fitting their sheets over the bed, having sex with him, leaving. And then the next one, and the next one. And the next day: the same. His life is a series of dreary patterns: sex, cutting, this, that. Visits to Andy, visits to the hospital. Not this time, he thinks. This is when he does something different; this is when he escapes.” 

The cycle that Jude describes here contributes to a feeling of claustrophobia in the novel, that the walls of the novel are closing in on both Jude and the reader. The cycle of Jude’s self-harm, his friends’ distraught reactions, his attempts to stop, and his eventual return to his old ways recur again and again, with the hospital almost as frequent a setting as Jude’s own apartment. The repetition creates a sense of pressure and tension, the sense that his situation is untenable and must be resolved through either a miraculous breakthrough or his death.