(It has now begun to appear on end-of-the-year top-ten lists.) I read some of the positive reviews. and the U.K., the subject of many enthusiastic reviews and reader testimonials, and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. “A Little Life” became one of the most-talked-about books of 2015, a best-seller in the U.S. I thought it was great that books like that existed, and I knew they met a need, but they weren’t for me. I didn’t appreciate the ready-made importance or seriousness that seemed to be conferred by the subject matter. This decision was based on a belief I formed about myself as a child in the nineteen-eighties: some people, I saw, really liked to read novels about foster children who had flashbacks to terrible encounters with pedophiles or other abusers, but I usually preferred books that were about other things. When I first heard about Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”-a seven-hundred-and-twenty-page, four-friends-in-New-York novel that unexpectedly morphs into the saga of the self-loathing and self-harm of the disabled survivor of serial homosexual pedophilia-I didn’t plan on reading it. Photograph by Sophia Evans / eyevine / Redux In Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” one of the most-talked-about books of 2015, a mélange of misery and lifestyle porn gives way to something true and recognizable.
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