PHOTOGRAPHY: LEON CSERNOHLAVEK
Like most authors, Hanya Yanagihara is fairly unassuming. Looking at her, you’d never guess that she was the mind behind the titanic novel A Little Life – one of the year’s great literary triumphs. Yet this 41-year-old Hawaiian native turned it around in just eighteen months. It’s particularly impressive as she managed it around her full-time day job as Editor at Large for Conde Nast Traveller. “Having a day job is terrible for me in a lot of ways, but it does help because it really helps you compartmentalise your life, and use your time effectively,” she claims.
Many critics and readers have labelled A Little Life a gay novel, and although it does profile a same-sex relationship and features a few other minor gay characters, to classify it as gay feels reductive. Hanya has deconstructed the traditional notions of the kinds of relationships men should be in, in order to let them develop as naturally as possible, without the labels or expectations which she feels limit men emotionally. At the heart of the novel, we see a strong male friendship become a love affair. “It’s simply a love story,” she says, “and one of the things that has been particularly humbling is the number of gay men who have reached out to me online, but I wonder if one of the things that is resonating with them is this idea that male friendship is much blurrier than we give credit for it being, and there are different ways men express love for each other that we don’t really think about because we think of love between men in very binary terms.”