Prior to my interview with Hanya Yanagihara, an email arrives from her publicist. It warns that the blockbuster literary author of A Little Life, and now To Paradise, does not read reviews of her books or pieces about herself. This, explains the publicist, can cause a frustrating frisson during interviews, because journalists will press Yanagihara to respond to critiques of her work she has not seen.
What intrigues here is that Yanagihara, 47, is not some literary recluse in the JD Salinger vein: she defines her novel-writing as her “night job”; her “day job” is editor-in-chief of the New York Times’ style magazine, T. How, I ask Yanagihara, when we speak, does she contrive to ignore herself, given that her job is to predict the zeitgeist and she is such a talked-about novelist?
