I read A Little Life in the autumn of 2016. It was a year after Hanya Yanagihara’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel had been published, and a few days after I had been discharged from hospital. I’d spent two weeks on the urology ward, having multiple minor surgeries for a kidney issue that festered into sepsis. I was feeling raw, tender and embodied, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I thought my “recovery period” would be the perfect time to finally pick up the 800-page tome everyone had been talking about: the acclaimed and supposedly “subversive” work of literature that, I had been assured by friends and critics alike, would make me weep.
What greeted me was a narrative so saturated with suffering that it made my own sickness seem insubstantial. Even sepsis is small and puny in comparison to the trials, tribulations and complex trauma of Jude, the novel’s protagonist. At the start he is just one shadowy member of a group of four male friends in New York City, but over the course of the book he comes into sharp focus. His past, Yanagihara reveals, was riddled with physical and sexual abuse; his present is marred by extreme self-harm. Now, this gruelling narrative has been brought to life for a four-hour West End play, with James Norton starring as Jude. The scenes of self-harm are graphically depicted: after witnessing an audience member nearly pass out during the play’s brief run at the 2022 Edinburgh Festival, director Ivo van Hove said, “the show is deliberately physically intense, because Jude is full of pain”.
