book review the little life

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Book Reviews

'a little life': an unforgettable novel about the grace of friendship.

John Powers

A Little Life

Buy featured book.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?

• Independent Bookstores

America is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times . We just love tales about healing.

But how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life , a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience . As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night.

The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages — yes, 700 — we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.

Yanagihara has a keen eye for social detail, and reading her early riff on actors like Willem who work as waiters, you may think she's offering something familiar — a generational portrait like Mary McCarthy's The Group or the witty, emblematic realism of Jonathan Franzen. In fact, the book's apparent normalcy lures you into the woods of something darker, stranger and more harrowing. Turns out that everything largely orbits around one of the four, Jude, whose gothic past Yanagihara slowly reveals.

For those who want trigger warnings, consider yourself warned — Jude's tale has enough triggers for a Texas gun show. The poor guy may endure the harshest childhood in fiction, one that's equal parts Dickens, Sade and Grimm's Fairy Tales . Evidently named for the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing, Jude is treated so badly that I flashed back to my mom reading me the book Beautiful Joe , about a dog so cruelly abused that I melted into inconsolable weeping.

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago. Sam Levy/Courtesy of Doubleday hide caption

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago.

Yanagihara writes with even more trenchant precision about the scars on the adult Jude's soul — the self-hatred and self-destructiveness, the yearning for love laced with utter mistrust, the baroque defense mechanisms he erects to keep anyone from learning who he really is. He struggles again and again, in long frustrating detail, to recover from his past, along with support from his friends, his doctor, Andy, and his law-school mentor, Harold, who becomes a father figure.

Now, I should also warn you that these struggles become too much, as sometimes happens with a John Cassavetes movie. Readers will be ready to move on, even if Jude is not. Then again, the book's driven obsessiveness is inseparable from the emotional force that will leave countless readers weeping.

Besides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories — "People don't change," Jude decides — it calls on our imaginative sympathy. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends — and readers — must work to enter. Not that this is impossible, mind you. He's no alien. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches.

While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him; the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life , it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life”

By Jon Michaud

At the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, “A Little Life,” four young men, all graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about establishing adult lives for themselves in New York City. They are a pleasingly diverse crew, tightly bound to each other: Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter but aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, the biracial scion of a wealthy Upper East Side family, who has landed an associate position with a European starchitect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the child of Haitian immigrants, who works as a receptionist at a downtown art magazine in whose pages he expects, one day soon, to be featured; and Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose provenance and ethnic origins are largely unknown, even by his trio of friends. Jude, we later learn, was a foundling, deposited in a bag by a dumpster and raised by monks.

For the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” among them. At one point, after his acting career takes off, Willem thinks, “New York City … had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.” Yanagihara is a capable chronicler of the struggle for success among the young who flock to New York every autumn, sending up the pretensions of the art world and the restaurant where Willem works, which is predictably staffed by would-be thespians. “New York was populated by the ambitious,” JB observes. “It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common…. Ambition and atheism.”

Yet it becomes evident soon enough that the author has more on her mind than a conventional big-city bildungsroman. For one thing, there’s the huge hunk of paper in the reader’s right hand: more than seven hundred pages, suggesting grander ambitions than a tale of successful careers. There are also curious absences in the text. Yanagihara scrubs her prose of references to significant historical events. The September 11th attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery.

But the clearest sign that “A Little Life” will not be what we expect is the gradual focus of the text on Jude’s mysterious and traumatic past. As the pages turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery. And having upset our expectations once, Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come to expect from stories that take such a dark turn.

The first real hint of what we’re in for comes on page 67, when Jude wakes Willem, his roommate, saying, “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry.” Jude is bleeding profusely from his arm, which is wrapped in a towel. He is evasive about the cause of the wound and insists that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital, asking instead that Willem take him to a mutual friend named Andy, who is a doctor. At the end of the visit, having sewn up Jude’s wound, Andy says to Willem, “You know he cuts himself, don’t you?”

The cutting becomes a leitmotif. Every fifty pages or so, we get a scene in which Jude mutilates his own flesh with a razor blade. It is described with a directness that might make some readers queasy: “He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself.”

The cutting is both a symptom of and a control mechanism for the profound abuse Jude suffered during the years before he arrived at the university. The precise nature of that suffering is carefully doled out by Yanagihara in a series of flashbacks, each more gruesome than its predecessors. Jude was taught to cut himself by Brother Luke, the monk who abducted him from the monastery. Initially, Brother Luke appeared to be Jude’s savior, spiriting him away from an institution where he was regularly beaten and sexually assaulted. Brother Luke promises Jude that they will go and live together as father and son in a house in the woods, but the reality of their years on the road is much, much grimmer. Eventually, Jude is liberated from Brother Luke, but by then he appears to be marked for sexual violation. “You were born for this,” Brother Luke tells him. And, for a long time, Jude believes him.

The graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering that one finds in “A Little Life” are rare in mainstream literary fiction. Novels that deal with these matters often fade out when the violence begins. The abuse in “Lolita,” for instance, is largely off camera, so to speak, or wrapped complexly in Nabokov’s lyrical prose. In Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” the child narrator is banished to the closet while his mother is raped by their captor. You are more likely to find sustained and explicit depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be less decorous. Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story,” Steig Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and the torture of Theon Greyjoy in “A Game of Thrones” all came to mind when I was reading “A Little Life” (though the torture of Theon is more explicit in the HBO series than in George R. R. Martin’s books). Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.

One of the few recent novels that’s comparable to “A Little Life” in this respect is Merritt Tierce’s “Love Me Back,” a fierce book about a self-destructive Texas waitress who cuts and burns herself, abuses drugs, and submits herself to debasing sexual encounters. But that novel, at a mere two hundred pages, is a slim silver dagger, not the broadsword that Yanagihara wields. And unlike Tierce’s book, in which there is little reprieve for the reader, Yanagihara balances the chapters about Jude’s suffering with extended sections portraying his friendships and his successful career as a corporate litigator. One of the reasons the book is so long is that it draws on these lighter stretches to make the darker ones bearable. Martin Amis once asked, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” And the surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of “A Little Life” are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends.

What makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance beyond these tender moments. It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual salvation of this sort does not exist. None of Jude’s tormentors are ever termed “evil” by him or anyone else. During his years of suffering, only once are we told that Jude prays “to a god he didn’t believe in” (note the lowercase “g_”_). Though he is named after the patron saint of lost causes—the name given to him by the monks who raised him—what’s most obviously lost here is the promise of spiritual absolution or even psychological healing. In this godless world, friendship is the only solace available to any of us.

Of course, atheism is not uncommon in contemporary literary novels; with notable exceptions, such as the works of Marilynne Robinson, few such books these days have any religious cast. But perhaps that is why they rarely depict extreme suffering—because it is a nearly impossible subject to engage with directly if you are not going to offer some kind of spiritual solution. “God whispers to us in our pleasures … but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” C. S. Lewis wrote, in “The Problem of Pain.” In “A Little Life,” pain is not a message from God, or a path to enlightenment, and yet Yanigihara listens to it anyway.

In addition to his law degree, Jude pursues a master’s in pure mathematics. At one point, he explains to his friends that he is drawn to math because it offers the possibility of “a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” For Jude, then, mathematics takes the place of religion, in a sense. Later, during one of his worst episodes of suffering, Jude turns to a concept known as the axiom of equality, which states that x always equals x .

It assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality … but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Dhruv Khullar

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

By Bruce Headlam

By Christopher Weyant

A Little Life : The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here

Hanya Yanagihara’s novel is an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America.

In a 2013 essay for Salon , the culture writer Daniel D’Addario lamented the absence of a big, ambitious novel about gay life in America today. While the number of LGBT characters in mainstream novels has increased, he argued, they’re too often relegated to subplots or “window dressing,” their lives left “sketchy and oblique.” D’Addario surveyed a number of prominent gay writers about his thesis, and the next day Tyler Coates summarized their views for Flavorwire in a piece titled “ The Great Gay Novel is Never Going to Happen .”

Recommended Reading

The Puzzling Virus That Infects Almost Everyone

The Secret of Scooby-Doo ’s Enduring Appeal

Dear Therapist: My Roommate Is Cheating on Her Boyfriend With Me

But I think it’s possible that novel has happened, even if no one has quite realized it yet. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was released in March, is one of the most buzzed-about books of the season, hailed as a “tour de force,” “extraordinary,” “elemental and irreducible,” “astonishing,” and the work of “ a major American novelist .” But no coverage of the book I’ve seen has discussed it as a novel fundamentally about gay lives—as the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.

The book follows a group of four men—Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm—over three decades of friendship, from their years as college roommates to the heights of professional success. Three of them form their primary physical and emotional bonds with other men, though sometimes in ways that challenge the usual nomenclatures. Of the novel’s main characters, only JB unambiguously embodies an immediately recognizable and unambivalent gay identity. Willem spends much of his adulthood pursuing sexual relationships with women, before he recognizes his desire for Jude and acknowledges their friendship as a life partnership. In college, JB calls Jude “the Postman” because he seems to entirely escape the usual categories: “We never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him … [He’s] post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.”

The complexity of the characters’ relationships to sexual identity is one way Yanagihara elevates them from mere “window dressing,” and I suspect it’s one reason A Little Life hasn’t been recognized as a book fundamentally about gay male experience. Another is that readers have come to expect such books to be written by gay men and to be at least plausibly confessional. From Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982) to Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2011), novels about gay men and their lives have often been more or less easily mappable onto the author’s biography. In essays and interviews , Yanagihara has spoken of her desire instead to write across difference, exploring what she sees as specifically male friendships and emotional communication.

Just as Yanagihara’s characters challenge conventional categories of gay identity, so A Little Life avoids the familiar narratives of gay fiction. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped modern gay identity—sickness and discrimination—obliquely, avoiding the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel. Her characters suffer relatively little anxiety about the public reception of their sexual identities—only Malcolm will be tormented by coming out, before realizing that in fact he’s straight—and HIV is conspicuously absent from the book’s weirdly ahistorical New York City.

But queer suffering is at the heart of A Little Life . The novel centers on Jude, who’s 16 when he arrives at an affluent New England college with only a backpack of baggy clothes. Parentless and horribly scarred, with his legs disfigured in an incident whose details he guards as closely as everything else about his past, he’s profoundly aware of his “extreme otherness.” The book slowly discloses luridly gothic episodes from his life before college, among them abandonment, childhood in a monastery, horrifying physical and sexual abuse, prostitution, and abduction. “You were made for this, Jude,” he’s told by the only adult he loves, a monk who betrays his trust, and Jude comes to believe that his suffering is a consequence of what he is: “He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to be used.”

Jude’s childhood is an extreme iteration of the abandonment, exploitation, and abuse that remain endemic in the experience of queer young people. Recent discussion of that experience has been dominated by an affirmative narrative—“It Gets Better”—that may be true for most. But it isn’t true for Jude. Even as he acquires wealth and power, Jude’s sense of the logic of his life never changes. His self-loathing is shocking from the start, and only grows more abject: he is “a nothing,” “rotten,” “useless,” “ugly,” “a piece of junk,” “inhuman … deficient … disgusting.” “Every year, his right to humanness diminished,” he reflects late in the novel; “every year, he became less and less of a person.” After the abuse he has suffered, he will never be able to able to enjoy sex, even as he craves the physical and emotional intimacy he finds in his partnership with Willem.

Both the intensity of pain Jude endures and other aspects of his and his friends’ lives—each is brilliant, each becomes not just successful but famous—strain credulity, and while Yanagihara has insisted that the novel’s plot is “not, technically, implausible,” it’s clear that the book is after something other than strict realism. This has annoyed some critics. In The New York Times Book Review , Carol Anshaw accused the novel both of being “allegorical” in its disregard for social and historical reality, and of placing the reader in a voyeuristic attitude toward suffering that’s so baroque as to seem like “a contrivance.”

To understand the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its characters’ inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera . The book is scaled to the intensity of Jude’s inner life, and for long passages it forces the reader to experience a world that’s brutally warped by suffering. Again and again A Little Life conveys Jude’s sense of himself through elaborate metaphor: he is “a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth,” “a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled,” “a scooped out husk.” His memories are “hyenas,” his fear “a flock of flapping bats,” his self-hatred a “beast.” This language infects those closest to him, so that for Willem, learning about his childhood is “plunging an arm into the snake- and centipede-squirming muck of Jude’s past.” In its sometimes grueling descriptions of Jude’s self-harm and his perceptions of his own body, the book reminds readers of the long filiation between gay art and the freakish, the abnormal, the extreme—those aspects of queer culture we’ve been encouraged to forget in an era that’s increasingly embracing gay marriage and homonormativity.

This is not a register of feeling or expression readers are accustomed to in American literary fiction. Yanagihara has described the experience of writing the novel as “a fever dream,” and reading it induces a similar effect. Part of this is due to the novel’s structural conceit: In nearly every section, a present-moment scene is interrupted for dozens of pages by elaborate flashbacks, mimicking the way Jude’s past irrupts into his present. Combined with the novel’s emotional extremity and the tightness of its focus on Jude’s consciousness, this nonlinear structure produces a feeling of immersion that’s almost unprecedented in my experience as a reader.

The novel’s darkness is leavened by its portrayal of Jude’s friends, whose attempts to care for him inevitably recall the communities of care formed by LGBT people in response to the AIDS crisis. Each of Jude’s friends cares for him differently, uniquely: Malcolm by designing spaces that will accommodate his disability; JB by painting portraits “kinder than the eye alone would see”; Willem by being the one person to whom he can tell his entire history. They make innumerable accommodations to Jude’s daily needs; in periods of crisis, they monitor him, making sure he eats and doesn’t harm himself.

The book vigorously defends friendship as a primary relationship, as central as marriage to the making of lives and communities. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” Willem thinks early in the novel. “Why wasn’t it even better?” For Jude, his friends “had imagined his life for him … they had allowed him to believe in possibilities that he would never have conceived.” Their relationships with one another challenge categorization. “They were inventing their own type of relationship,” Willem thinks of Jude, “one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”

These passages recall similar defenses of friendship from queer writers before the age of marriage equality, especially Edmund White. “And friendship will be elevated into the supreme consolation for this continuing tragedy, human existence,” White wrote in 1983, as he was beginning to understand both the scope of the AIDS crisis and the need for novel social arrangements to sustain queer communities through it.

“It might have been mawkish,” one character thinks about his feeling for Jude, “but it was also true.” This is the claim that animates A Little Life : that by violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama and exaggeration and sentiment, it can access emotional truths denied more modest means of expression. In this astonishing novel, Yanagihara achieves what great gay art from Proust to Almodóvar has so often sought: a grandeur of feeling adequate to “the terrifying largeness, the impossibility of the world.”

The Literary Edit

Review: A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara

I was gifted A Little Life for my 30th birthday by two of my wonderful friends Nik and Mitch. With a matter of hours to spare before the clock struck midnight on the final eve of my twenties, I had finished the long, laborious, emotional and enriching challenge of finishing the BBC Top 100 ; a feat that I was incredibly proud of, and one that I very nearly didn’t finish.

And so it was that when shopping for my birthday present, Mitch decided to seek the advice of a bookseller; unsure of what to get someone whose taste and reading history was quite so eclectic as mine. He told the bookseller I had just finished reading the BBC Top 100, and was thus presented with A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I love getting books for my birthday; for me they are the very best gifts of all; but having spent the prior two months waking pre-dawn in order to read before work, I was looking forward to a much deserved rest from anything too large or intellectual.

I’d heard great things about A Little Life; it was, after all, shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction – a prize that, having worked on for two years, I hold very dear to my heart. However, as with all books that are lauded by many, there too, was much criticism of the intensity of the book, and the violence that laid therein. I heard of people who had stopped half way through, claimed it was 400 pages too long and found the ferocity too much to bear. And despite having had it on my bookshelf for a little over two months, it was only when my friend Polly and Jayne from Girl Tweets World  encouraged me to read it, that I finally took the plunge.

Little did I know what was to lie ahead. Written over the course of eighteen months, it tells the tale of four friends – JB, Jude, Malcom and Willem who are living in New York after graduating from college. Their backgrounds and occupations vary; Malcolm is a struggling architect from a wealthy family of biracial parentage who still lives at home, JB is a painter of Haitian descent, Willem is an actor whose parents were Danish and Swedish while Jude is of ambiguous ethnic origins and works as a lawyer, but together they are bound by a deep and limitless friendship.

Despite, however, the closeness of the group, little is known of Jude’s past – other than that he was involved in an incident that he refers to as a car injury – which has resulted in nerve damage to his spine and the limp with which he walks. As the story progresses, the men enter their thirties; each of them carving out successful careers while still upholding a close friendship. Meanwhile, cleverly woven into the narrative are glimpse of Jude’s distressing and disturbing past; one that is ripe, ever-present and continues to haunt him.

As time passes the friendship of the four characters is tested; make-ups and break-ups take place, bonds strengthen, deepen and ultimately break. What remains constant through Yanagihara’s achingly beautiful narrative, however, is the self-torture Jude inflicts upon himself; the worthlessness and shame he feels; and the unbroken desire to end his life.

The novel’s characters – the central four protagonists and beyond – are so gracefully imagined that it’s impossible not to be heavily invested in each and every one of their lives, and by the time I turned the final page, I felt like a little part of me was gone, never to be replaced again. The prose is achingly alive; the two timeframes expertly interlaced, and there is little question over the prowess of Yanagihara as an astonishing storyteller.

A Little Life is an all-consuming, in parts emotional, often painful read. It is heartbreaking and hopeful; it is brilliant, it is beautiful, it is brutal and bewitching. It is abundant in courage and compassion. I will, undoubtedly, remain a voracious reader, but I fear that nothing will ever quite come close to the inconceivable A Little Life. 

Love this post?  Click here  to subscribe.

• Bibliotherapy Sessions
• In the press
• Disclaimer + privacy policy
• Work with me
• The BBC Big Read
• The 1001 Books to Read Before You Die
• Desert Island Books
• Books by Destination
• Beautiful Bookstores
• Literary Travel
• Stylish Stays
• The Journal
• The Bondi Literary Salon

Book Review: ‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara

I’m Convinced We Are All Pawns In Balenciaga’s Giant Social Experiment

House of Sky & Breath by Sarah J. Maas

Swimsuits That Are Almost Too Hot To Handle

An Oldie But A Goodie – Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ Has Had A Modern-Day Makeover

The Met Gala 2023: Is This Really What Karl Would’ve Wanted?

I had to put this book down so many times before I could finish it. Dubbed the best-written book of our generation, it is also described as one of the most heart-wrenching, devastating, disturbing, most depressing book ever read. Powerful and honest prose, A Little Life was almost torture to finish. I couldn’t put it down, but at the same time, I pushed and pulled with my conscience to take a break for my mental health. Incredibly difficult to read, I have only ever read one book with tougher content ( My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, if you really must know – read with caution). I made myself read only one chapter a week, when normally, with prose written as addictively as this, it would take me perhaps 4 or 5 days to finish it entirely. Whether it made it worse – that I had to sit and properly take in what had happened that chapter – I don’t know.

A Little Life follows the life of a young man named Jude, and his friends, Willem, JB, and Malcolm; their meeting at university; and their lives growing older in New York. Always intertwined in some respect, this book unravels the meaning of true friendship, which shines like a lighthouse beacon throughout the book. Every time the content is hard and cruel, the friendship and love cuts through. The star character is Jude St. Francis, who is a star to everyone but himself.

Jude has endured too many tough, life-changing moments in his life, any one of them being almost too much to bear, but the hardest part to read about Jude is his inability to love himself, and his longing to get better not for himself, but for the others around him. His awareness of knowing his personal boundaries, wanting to surpass them, but just not being able to. Jude is standing in the doorway of his life, never being able to step outside onto the porch. He can’t bring himself to voice the past he grapples with, and his non-existent self-esteem that comes with it. When you’re depressed and someone asks you how you are, the answer “Fine” seems almost like a call for help, when outwardly it says the opposite. Jude is crying out for help, for connection, for love, and true kindness, without ever having the ability to do so.

One of the most overwhelming reactions when I talk about this book is, “I’ve never experienced so much love.” Love is the strongest theme in the book, with agape (unconditional love) and philia (familial love) taking centre stage. It’s the love of Jude’s friends that care for him as a doctor, as adopted parents, as someone who understands Jude, as someone who builds a home for Jude, as someone who mentors Jude, and someone who captures Jude through art – because he can never see his own beauty or worth.

It is a slow burn, and at over 700 pages, it’s an intimidating read. The story is slow and winding, jumping between character’s point of view, and moments in time. The narrative is so aware of human behaviour, that it’s like seeing ultimate clarity almost of our own consciousness. If someone saw your life through your own mind, thoughts and all, and could explain moments that you couldn’t even understand. Hanya Yanagihara puts to words thoughts that you’ve had that are so fleeting and intangible, you didn’t even know you had had them until you read a sentence that triggers your memory of a thought that wasn’t quite a thought. Yanagihara delves so deeply into the minds and thoughts of the characters that you know them more deeply than you know your own friends. She creates the characters’ personalities not by telling you how they are, but by being who they are. The reason A Little Life is so heart-wrenching is not because you have been told a story, but because you have become the characters; you have lived a full life being the characters – bad days, deepest thoughts, hopeful weeks, and hopeless years.

There are times in this book when I had to close my eyes to stop myself from reading the next words. It’s like a car crash. Everything slows down, the car is flying through the air, time stops for a second and everything is stuck in place. But then, time starts again, you keep on reading, the car hits the tarmac, you are irrevocably changed. Most storytellers have a line that they do not cross, for example, there’s not many writers that would kill the dog. Hanya Yanagihara kills the metaphorical dog. She holds nothing back. She is not afraid to rip apart the story – all you’ve ever known in this little life! But that’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes the dog does die, even if it breaks your heart – regardless of whether it breaks your heart. Perhaps that’s why A Little Life is so heart-breaking to read. Because it’s real, and it’s life, and it doesn’t stop for anyone. Willem sums up this perfectly towards the end of the novel, “…a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it.”

If this year has taught us anything, it’s the importance of our health. Jude struggles with his health throughout the book, and it leaves us with the feeling of a fist around our heart. It is that fear of the worst that can happen in sickness – when it is out of our hands, when you want to cure someone but cannot, when there is nothing you can do but watch it unfold.

I cannot express how much I loved this book. I agree with the critics and really do believe that it’s one of the best books of our generation. As an English Lit graduate, I can say that I’ve read a lot of classic, life-changing books in my time, and A Little Life takes its place up on the podium among the best of them. We are lucky to read a book like this in our lifetimes. It is rare to find not only an extraordinary not-commonly-told story, but with extraordinary writing and narrative to match. It was an ordeal reading this book, one that spilled many a tear, but nevertheless, I’m looking forward to reading it all over again (albeit with a couple of year’s grace), if only so I can experience Jude’s journey, to look at all that hardship, loss, and love, and watch in awe.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Normal People: A Hot Take

A Selection Of Chonky Books That If You Can Hack It, You Should 100% Read

Your Summer Reading List For 2022

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Discover more from the butterworth effect.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2015

Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Hanya Yanagihara

BOOK REVIEW

by Hanya Yanagihara

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

More by Harper Lee

by Harper Lee

SEEN & HEARD

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

More by J.D. Salinger

by J.D. Salinger

APPRECIATIONS

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

April 16, 2024

• Marcello Di Cintio remembers Saleem al-Naffar
• Imani Perry profiles playwright Suzan-Lori Parks
• Our enduring fascination with Tom Ripley

• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: $21.83

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Other Sellers on Amazon

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

A Little Life: A Novel Hardcover – March 10, 2015

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 720 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Doubleday
• Publication date March 10, 2015
• Dimensions 6.45 x 1.7 x 9.53 inches
• ISBN-10 0385539258
• ISBN-13 978-0385539258
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; First Edition (March 10, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 720 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385539258
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385539258
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.45 x 1.7 x 9.53 inches
• #53 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
• #317 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
• #974 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Videos for this product

Click to play video

Review of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara | Worth a read?

🌟Turner Family Reviews🌟

A Little Life: A Novel

Amazon Videos

About the author

Hanya yanagihara.

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.

http://instagram.com/hanyayanagihara

https://instagram.com/alittlelifebook/

https://www.instagram.com/toparadisenovel/

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

– Entertainment Analysis and Reviews

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara: Exploring Complex Themes

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a novel that has captured the attention of readers and critics alike since its publication in 2015. The book tells the story of four college friends — Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB — as they navigate their way through adulthood in New York City. At the center of the story is Jude, a deeply traumatized individual whose past is slowly revealed over the course of the novel.

The book is a work of contemporary literature that has been praised for its vivid characterization, emotional depth, and intricate plotting. It has been compared to classic works of literature such as The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights for its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in life.

Despite its acclaim, the book has also been criticized for its graphic depictions of violence and abuse, which some readers have found difficult to stomach. Nevertheless, A Little Life continues to be a book that generates discussion and debate, and its impact on readers is undeniable. In this article, we will explore the various aspects of this book that make it such a compelling and thought-provoking read.

Summary of the Book

Literary analysis of the book, psychological themes explored in the book, social and cultural context of the book.

A. Plot Summary A Little Life tells the story of four friends — Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB — who meet in college and move to New York City after graduation. The book follows their lives over several decades as they pursue their careers and relationships, while also dealing with personal struggles and traumas. At the center of the story is Jude, a brilliant lawyer who has a dark and mysterious past that is slowly revealed over the course of the novel.

Main Characters and Their Relationships

• Jude: A complex and enigmatic character, Jude is the heart of the novel. He is a successful lawyer with a traumatic past that haunts him throughout the book. He is deeply private and struggles to form close relationships with others.
• Willem: Jude’s best friend and the person closest to him. He is a successful actor who remains devoted to Jude throughout the book.
• Malcolm: A successful architect who struggles with feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.
• JB: A talented artist who struggles with addiction and relationships.

Themes Explored in the Book

• Trauma and its effects on individuals and relationships.
• Friendship and the importance of human connection.
• The search for identity and meaning in life.
• Love and the complexities of relationships.

• Narrative Structure: A Little Life is structured around Jude’s life, with the story unfolding in a nonlinear fashion through a series of flashbacks and present-day scenes. This structure allows the reader to gradually piece together Jude’s past and the traumas that have shaped him. The book is divided into four parts, each representing a different stage of Jude’s life and marked by a significant event or turning point.
• Character: Development One of the book’s strengths is its richly drawn characters. The four main characters are complex and multidimensional, with distinct personalities and backgrounds. The novel’s focus on Jude allows for a deep exploration of his psyche and his struggles with trauma, identity, and relationships. Yanagihara uses vivid descriptions and introspection to create characters that feel fully realized and believable.
• Symbolism and Motifs: Throughout the book, Yanagihara uses a number of symbols and motifs to reinforce the novel’s themes. One of the most prominent is the recurring image of cutting, which represents both Jude’s self-harm and the emotional wounds that he carries with him. The novel also features a number of animal motifs, including birds and turtles, which serve to underscore the characters’ vulnerabilities and the fragile nature of life.

• Trauma and its effects: A Little Life explores the long-term effects of trauma on an individual’s psyche, relationships, and life choices. Jude’s traumatic past, which is slowly revealed over the course of the novel, has a profound impact on his life and relationships. The book examines the ways in which trauma can shape a person’s identity and behavior, and how it can be difficult to move past.
• Friendship and love: The novel also explores the complexities of friendship and love. The bond between Jude and his friends is a central focus of the book, and Yanagihara examines the ways in which these relationships are tested and strengthened over time. The book also explores the different forms that love can take, from romantic love to familial love, and the ways in which love can be both a source of comfort and pain.
• The meaning of life: A Little Life grapples with the existential question of the meaning of life. The characters in the novel are all searching for something, whether it is success, love, or purpose. The book raises questions about what gives life meaning and how we can find fulfillment in our lives.
• The search for identity: The novel also explores the search for identity, both individual and cultural. Jude’s struggle to come to terms with his past and his sense of self is a central theme of the book. The other characters also grapple with questions of identity, including questions of race, sexuality, and gender. The novel raises questions about how we construct our identities and the role that external factors play in shaping who we are.

The book’s commentary on contemporary society. The novel also offers a commentary on contemporary society, particularly on issues related to power, privilege, and inequality. The characters in the book come from a range of backgrounds and experiences, and the novel explores the ways in which these factors shape their lives and relationships. The book also grapples with questions of social justice and the ways in which individuals can work to make a difference in the world.

The book’s reception and impact on readers. A Little Life has been widely praised by critics and readers alike for its emotional depth, its richly drawn characters, and its exploration of complex themes. The book has been the subject of numerous book club discussions and literary analyses, and it has been hailed as a modern classic by many. The novel’s impact on readers has been particularly notable, with many readers describing the book as life-changing or transformative.

Through its exploration of trauma and its effects, A Little Life provides a nuanced portrayal of the ways in which our past experiences can shape our identities and relationships. The book’s examination of friendship and love is similarly rich and complex, highlighting the joys and challenges of these relationships. In exploring the meaning of life and the search for identity, the novel offers readers a thought-provoking meditation on some of life’s most profound questions.

The book’s representation of gender, race, and sexuality, as well as its commentary on contemporary society, makes it a particularly timely and relevant work. Through its diverse cast of characters and its nuanced portrayal of social issues, A Little Life offers readers a window into a range of experiences and perspectives.

Overall, A Little Life is a masterful work of contemporary literature that offers readers a moving and profound exploration of the human experience. Its impact on readers and the literary world is a testament to its enduring relevance and power.

Hi, I’m William Jones, the administrator of the exciting website explainedthis.com, which offers movie, music, and book reviews. With a deep passion for entertainment, I created this platform to provide a trusted source of information for fellow enthusiasts who want to stay up-to-date on the latest releases and trends.

I take great pride in my team of reviewers to provide high quality content that is informative and entertaining. Each review is thoroughly researched and written to ensure readers have a complete understanding of the subject matter.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

In 2024, we're changing how we do reading challenges. Make yours work for you

In 2024, we're changing how we do reading challenges ->   Make yours work for you

A Little Life

Four friends move to New York after graduating from college with big dreams of successful careers. JB is an artist, Willem an aspiring actor, Malcolm an architect, and Jude a lawyer. The story brings the reader into the lives of each of the men, finally landing on Jude. It's at this point that it's clear that this is not just another post-collegiate New York story. Jude is insular and mysterious, and as the story progresses, the degree of his damage and suffering emerges.

A Little Life covers decades in the life of the men and it is one of the most devastating, riveting books I've ever read. Many readers count it among their favorites--just as many say they loved it but could never read it again. For more, also check out The Story of the Story: 15 Things You Didn't Know about A Little Life .

This post may include affiliate links. That means if you click and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Please see Disclosures for more information.

Publisher’s Description

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

Featured In

• 30 of My All-Time Favorite Books (That You Might Love, Too)
• The Story of the Story: 15 Things You Didn’t Know About A Little Life
• 11 Devastating Books Like A Little Life
• 17 Powerful Books that Will Change Your Life
• 20 Books About Tragedy and Real-Life Struggle
• 11 Big, Extra-Long Books Worth Reading
• 30 Contemporary Fiction Novels for Your Book Bucket List
• 30 of the Best Books of the Decade
• Fiction and Nonfiction Books About Friendships
• Discussion: The Discomfort of Enjoying Books Inspired by Real-Life Tragedies

Privacy Overview

Book Review: A Little Life

This book is very heavy and grim, but Hanya Yanagihara gives a detailed insight into living with disabilities, mental illness, and addiction. I became attached to the characters from the start. Four young men- Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcom, have been best friends since being college roommates in New York, but their individual lives and struggles make it complicated to work through their mid-life crises. Despite the grief and somber moments in A Little Life, I appreciated the resilient mentors that the four, especially Jude, had. It had a loving message of always having a support system somewhere even if it doesn't feel like it, and that your past doesn't define you- your present choices do. However, the ending was open ended and left a lot for me to ponder over later. I'd recommend this if you like more somber, down to earth books (and if you're a fast reader, because this book took forever to read!) Grade 12

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

A Little Life review – James Norton’s sexually abused lawyer is spared no misery

Harold Pinter theatre, London Some called it torture porn, others a masterpiece. Ivo van Hove brings Hanya Yanagihara’s novel to the West End, complete with spurting blood, relentless sadism and not a little nudity

H anya Yanagihara’s sprawling, relentlessly graphic door-stopper of a novel about sexual abuse and self-harm divided the room when it was published in 2015. Some called it torture porn, others hailed it a masterpiece. So it is perhaps not surprising that its West End adaptation began making lurid headlines well before opening night.

Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove , first in Dutch and now premiering in English, there have been reports of spurting blood, fainting fits and illicit mobile phone images of a naked James Norton, who plays the central, agonised figure of Jude St Francis. That last one has sparked debate on the potential banning of phones inside auditoriums. What kind of logistical mayhem might that cause? Will theatregoers be asked to go through airport-style scanners? And all with no guarantees a phone will not be smuggled in anyway.

The nudity is hardly shocking in the mix of it all, and comes so often that we feel inured to the sight of men – mostly Norton – slipping out of their trousers. Where Yanagihara faced some charges of appropriation in her depiction of male friendship and gay desire, that criticism cannot be applied to this adaptation by Koen Tachelet, Van Hove and Yanagihara. The consensual sex, when it comes, does not seem gratuitous.

The story follows Jude, an orphaned child who, taken in by monastic Christians, is groomed by Brother Luke (Elliot Cowan, chilling) and violently raped by paedophiles over several years. He escapes at 15 only to fall into the clutches of a sadistic doctor (also Cowan, even more chilling). There is plenty of spurting blood, as per the headlines, but it has a ruthless integrity to it: the production is asking us to consider the effects of abuse, across a lifetime, with all its horrifying repetition.

We shuttle between Jude’s present, beginning at the age of 28 when he has become a brilliant lawyer in New York, and his monstrous past, which continues to stalk him. Brother Luke is a rock-solid spectre in Jude’s adulthood, striding beside him, ambushing every moment and showing, vividly, how a survivor of child abuse can become trapped by perpetually relived trauma, even when he is surrounded by love, as Jude is here by his friends Willem (Luke Thompson), JB (Omari Douglas), Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), and adoptive father Harold (Zubin Varla).

There is something heroic in the staging of this story in the West End: resolutely bleak with no catharsis and cyclical violence, it is an almost anthropological study of pain. It is staged with utmost intelligence too: moments of pitched emotion are accompanied by the nerve-jangling sounds of violins and cello; a rolling film-scape of New York’s streets on either side of Jan Versweyveld’s set brings an implacable forward movement as we march through Jude’s life and its inescapable suffering.

But for all its sophistication and searing qualities, it is a discomforting production. The gripe, for me, lies with Yanagihara’s original story, the shortcomings of which become all the more jarring on stage. Jude is not spared any extremity of pain and misery, it seems, and the serial abuse to which he is subjected continue to adulthood, reinforcing inevitability around the notion that an abused child stays the abused adult. There is a vague, bilious sense that even his friends recognise his “abused” personality and perhaps find ways to exploit it, however covertly. JB, a painter, makes Jude a subject of his art despite Jude’s expressed wish otherwise while Willem tells him “You’re so damaged” as he kisses him.

Although Norton convinces as Jude at every stage, his character is a cipher in itself – a patron saint of pain, an obscured Jude who is wholly defined by his abuse (he wears a bloodied shirt for most of the show). He becomes a Christ-like figure in one scene in which he is beaten – and then, with arms spread, his pummelled body is lifted off the ground, as if ascending. “We all look the same when we cry,” someone says, and it is this obliteration of the individual in the face of a blank, erasing pain that grates. Jude is nothing more than his tears, never the hotshot lawyer that we are supposed to believe him to be.

And where Yanagihara’s book followed the trajectories of Jude’s friends to paint a compelling picture of their love towards Jude, here we only see flashes of this camaraderie and warmth, which leaves the story less textured, more unremittingly focused on abuse and its legacy. The set’s open-plan layout – office, art studio, kitchen, hospital, bathroom and lounge – exposes all the characters’ lives at once and many remain on stage, in their own worlds. But they appear marginal, superficial, schmaltzy, despite this presence. There is a cursory glance at tensions between Jude and JB, brilliantly played by Douglas, but he stands painting for the most part, which seems like a waste.

We are positioned as jurors of sorts, bearing witness to all that is done to Jude. A small swathe of the audience is seated on the other side of the stage. This seems symbolic, as if they – we – are not only there to watch the drama unfold but also as mirrors, reflecting the passive pain of witnessing. Ultimately this returns us to the same central contention around Yanagihara’s novel: is this a story that wallows in the horror of bearing witness, or one that dares to look that horror unflinchingly in the face?

A Little Life is at Harold Pinter theatre , London, until 18 June

• Ivo van Hove
• Hanya Yanagihara

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

Libraries are full of books about great cats. This one is special.

Caleb carr’s memoir, ‘my beloved monster,’ is a heart-rending tale of human-feline connection.

Over the years, my wife and I have been blessed with 15 cats, three rescued from the streets of Brooklyn, three from barns near our home in Vermont, one from a Canadian resort and the others from the nearby shelter, where my wife has volunteered as a “cat whisperer” for the most emotionally scarred of its feline inhabitants for years. Twelve of our beloved pets have died (usually in our arms), and we could lose any of our current three cats — whose combined age is roughly 52 — any day now. So, I am either the best person to offer an opinion on Caleb Carr’s memoir, “ My Beloved Monster ,” or the worst.

For the many who have read Carr’s 1994 novel, “The Alienist,” an atmospheric crime story set in 19th-century New York, or watched the Netflix series it inspired, Carr’s new book might come as something of a surprise. “My Beloved Monster” is a warm, wrenching love story about Carr and his cat, a half-wild rescue named Masha who, according to the subtitle of his book, in fact rescued Carr. The author is, by his own admission, a curmudgeon, scarred by childhood abuse, living alone and watching his health and his career go the way of all flesh.

What makes the book so moving is that it is not merely the saga of a great cat. Libraries are filled with books like that, some better than others. It’s the 17-year chronicle of Carr and Masha aging together, and the bond they forged in decline. (As Philip Roth observed, “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”) He chronicles their lives, beginning with the moment the animal shelter begs Carr to bring the young lioness home because the creature is so ferocious she unnerves the staff — “You have to take that cat!” one implores.

Interspersed throughout Carr’s account of his years with Masha are his recollections of all the other cats he has had in his life, going back to his youth in Manhattan. And there are a lot. Cats often provided him comfort after yet another torment his father, the writer Lucien Carr , and stepfather visited upon him. Moreover, Carr identifies so deeply with the species that as a small child he drew a self-portrait of a boy with a cat’s head. He knows a great deal about cats and is eager to share his knowledge, for instance about the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of their mouths that helps them decide if another creature is predator or prey. His observations are always astute: “Dogs tend to trust blindly, unless and until abuse teaches them discretion. … Cats, conversely, trust conditionally from the start.”

Carr, now 68, was a much younger man when he adopted Masha. Soon, however, they were joined at the hip. As the two of them bonded, the writer found himself marveling at what he believed were their shared childhood traumas, which move between horrifying and, in Carr’s hands, morbidly hilarious: “I began to accept my father’s behavior in the spirit with which he intended it … he was trying to kill me.” Man and cat shared the same physical ailments, including arthritis and neuropathy, possibly caused by physical violence in both cases. Carr allowed Masha, a Siberian forest cat, to go outside, a decision many cat owners may decry, but he defends it: “Masha was an entirely different kind of feline,” and keeping her inside “would have killed her just as certainly as any bear or dog.” Indeed, Masha took on fishers and bears (yes, bears!) on Carr’s wooded property in Upstate New York.

But bears and dogs are humdrum fare compared with cancer and old age, which come for both the novelist and his cat. Carr’s diagnosis came first, and his first concern was whether he would outlive Masha. (The existence of the book gives us the answer he didn’t have at the time.) Illness adds new intensity to the human-feline connection: “Coming back from a hospital or a medical facility to Masha was always particularly heartening,” Carr writes, “not just because she’d been worried and was glad to see me, but because she seemed to know exactly what had been going on … and also because she was so anxious to show that she hadn’t been scared, that she’d held the fort bravely.”

Sometimes, perhaps, Carr anthropomorphizes too much and exaggerates Masha’s language comprehension, or gives her more human emotion than she had. But maybe not. Heaven knows, I see a lot behind my own cats’ eyes. Moreover, it’s hard to argue with a passage as beautiful as this: “In each other’s company, nothing seemed insurmountable. We were left with outward scars. … But the only wounds that really mattered to either of us were the psychic wounds caused by the occasional possibility of losing each other; and those did heal, always, blending and dissolving back into joy.”

Like all good memoirs — and this is an excellent one — “My Beloved Monster” is not always for the faint of heart. Because life is not for the faint of heart. But it is worth the emotional investment, and the tissues you will need by the end, to spend time with a writer and cat duo as extraordinary as Masha and Carr.

Chris Bohjalian is the best-selling author of 24 books. His most recent novel, “The Princess of Las Vegas,” was published last month.

My Beloved Monster

Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me

By Caleb Carr

Little, Brown. 435 pp. $29

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Once Upon a Time, the World of Picture Books Came to Life

The tale behind a new museum of children’s literature is equal parts imagination, chutzpah and “The Little Engine That Could.”

By Elisabeth Egan

Photographs and Video by Chase Castor

Elisabeth Egan followed the Rabbit Hole as it was nearing completion. She has written about several of its inhabitants for The Times.

On a crisp Saturday morning that screamed for adventure, a former tin can factory in North Kansas City, Mo., thrummed with the sound of young people climbing, sliding, spinning, jumping, exploring and reading.

Yes, reading.

If you think this is a silent activity, you haven’t spent time in a first grade classroom. And if you think all indoor destinations for young people are sticky, smelly, depressing hellholes, check your assumptions at the unmarked front door.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hole, a brand-new, decade-in-the-making museum of children’s literature founded by the only people with the stamina for such a feat: former bookstore owners. Pete Cowdin and Deb Pettid are long-married artists who share the bullish determination of the Little Red Hen. They’ve transformed the hulking old building into a series of settings lifted straight from the pages of beloved picture books.

Before we get into what the Rabbit Hole is, here’s what it isn’t: a place with touch screens, a ball pit, inscrutable plaques, velvet ropes, a cloying soundtrack or adults in costumes. It doesn’t smell like graham crackers, apple juice or worse (yet). At $16 per person over 2 years old, it also isn’t cheap.

During opening weekend on March 16, the museum was a hive of freckles and gap toothed grins, with visitors ranging in age from newborn to well seasoned. Cries of “Look up here!,” “There’s a path we need to take!” and “There’s Good Dog Carl !” created a pleasant pandemonium. For every child galloping into the 30,000 square foot space, there was an adult hellbent on documenting the moment.

Did you ever have to make a shoe box diorama about your favorite book? If so, you might remember classmates who constructed move-in ready mini kingdoms kitted out with gingham curtains, clothespin people and actual pieces of spaghetti.

Cowdin, Pettid and their team are those students, all grown up.

The main floor of the Rabbit Hole consists of 40 book-themed dioramas blown up to life-size and arranged, Ikea showroom-style, in a space the size of two hockey rinks. The one inspired by John Steptoe’s “ Uptown ” features a pressed tin ceiling, a faux stained-glass window and a jukebox. In the great green room from “ Goodnight Moon ,” you can pick up an old-fashioned phone and hear the illustrator’s son reading the story.

One fictional world blends into the next, allowing characters to rub shoulders in real life just as they do on a shelf. Visitors slid down the pole in “The Fire Cat,” slithered into the gullet of the boa constrictor in “ Where the Sidewalk Ends ” and lounged in a faux bubble bath in “ Harry the Dirty Dog .” There are plenty of familiar faces — Madeline , Strega Nona , Babar — but just as many areas dedicated to worthy titles that don’t feature household names, including “ Crow Boy ,” “ Sam and the Tigers ,” “ Gladiola Garden ” and “ The Zabajaba Jungle .”

Emma Miller, a first-grade teacher, said, “So many of these are books I use in my classroom. It’s immersive and beautiful. I’m overwhelmed.”

As her toddler bolted toward “ Frog and Toad ,” Taylar Brown said, “We love opportunities to explore different sensory things for Mason. He has autism so this is a perfect place for him to find little hiding holes.”

A gaggle of boys reclined on a bean bag in “ Caps for Sale ,” passing around a copy of the book. Identical twins sounded out “ Bread and Jam for Frances ” on the pink rug in the badger’s house. A 3-year-old visiting for the second time listened to her grandfather reading “The Tawny Scrawny Lion.”

Tomy Tran, a father of three from Oklahoma, said, “I’ve been to some of these indoor places and it’s more like a jungle gym. Here, my kids will go into the area, pick up the book and actually start reading it as if they’re in the story.”

All the titles scattered around the museum are available for purchase at the Lucky Rabbit, a bookstore arranged around a cozy amphitheater. Pettid and Cowdin estimate that they’ve sold one book per visitor, with around 650 guests per day following the pink bunny tracks from the parking lot.

Once upon a time, Cowdin and Pettid owned the Reading Reptile, a Kansas City institution known not just for its children’s books but also for its literary installations. When Dav Pilkey came to town, Pettid and Cowdin welcomed him by making a three-and-a-half foot papier-mâché Captain Underpants. Young customers pitched in to build Tooth-Gnasher Superflash or the bread airplane from “In the Night Kitchen.”

One of the store’s devotees was Meg McMath, who continued to visit through college, long after she’d outgrown its offerings (and its chairs). Now 36, McMath traveled from Austin, Texas with her husband and six-month-old son to see the Rabbit Hole. “I’ve cried a few times,” she said.

The Reading Reptile weathered Barnes & Noble superstores and Amazon. Then came “the Harry Potter effect,” Pettid said, “where all of a sudden adults wanted kids to go from picture books to thick chapter books. They skipped from here to there; there was so much they were missing.”

As parents fell under the sway of reading lists for “gifted” kids, story time became yet another proving ground.

“It totally deformed the reading experience,” Cowdin said. Not to mention the scourge of every bookstore: surreptitious photo-snappers who later shopped online.

In 2016, Cowdin and Pettid closed the Reptile to focus on the Rabbit Hole, an idea they’d been percolating for years. They hoped it would be a way to spread the organic bookworm spirit they’d instilled in their five children while dialing up representation for readers who had trouble finding characters who looked like them. The museum would celebrate classics, forgotten gems and quality newcomers. How hard could it be?

Cowdin and Pettid had no experience in the nonprofit world. They knew nothing about fund-raising or construction. They’re ideas people, glass half full types, idealists but also stubborn visionaries. They didn’t want to hand their “dream” — a word they say in quotes — to consultants who knew little about children’s books. Along the way, board members resigned. Their kids grew up. Covid descended. A tree fell on their house and they had to live elsewhere for a year. “I literally have told Pete I quit 20 times,” Pettid said.

“It has not always been pleasant,” Cowdin said. “But it was just like, OK, we’re going to do this and then we’re going to figure out how to do it. And then we just kept figuring it out.”

Little by little, chugging along like “ The Little Engine That Could ,” they raised $15 million and assembled a board who embraced their vision and commitment to Kansas City. They made a wish list of books — “Every ethnicity. Every gender. Every publisher,” Pettid said — and met with rights departments and authors’ estates about acquiring permissions. Most were receptive; some weren’t. (They now have rights to more than 70 titles.)

“A lot of people think a children’s bookstore is very cute,” Pettid said. “They have a small mind for children’s culture. That’s why we had to buy this building.”

For $2 million, they bought the factory from Robert Riccardi, an architect whose family operated a beverage distribution business there for two decades. His firm, Multistudio, worked with Cowdin and Pettid to reimagine the space, which sits on an industrial corner bordered by train tracks, highways and skyline views.

Cowdin and Pettid started experimenting with layouts. Eventually they hired 39 staff members, including 21 full-time artists and fabricators who made everything in the museum from some combination of steel, wood, foam, concrete and papier-mâché.

“My parents are movers and shakers,” Gloria Cowdin said. She’s the middle of the five siblings, named after Frances the badger’s sister — and, yes, that’s her voice reading inside the exhibit. “There’s never been something they’ve wanted to achieve that they haven’t made happen, no matter how crazy.”

During a sneak peek in December, it was hard to imagine how this semi-construction zone would coalesce into a museum. The 22,000 square foot fabrication section was abuzz with drills and saws. A whiteboard showed assembly diagrams and punch lists. (Under “Random jobs,” someone had jotted, “Write Christmas songs.”) The entryway and lower level — known as the grotto and the burrow — were warrens of scaffolding and machinery.

But there were pockets of calm. Kelli Harrod worked on a fresco of trees outside the “ Blueberries for Sal ” kitchen, unfazed by the hubbub. In two years as lead painter, she’d witnessed the Rabbit Hole’s steady growth.

“I remember painting the ‘ Pérez and Martina ’ house before there was insulation,” Harrod said. “I was bundled up in hats, gloves and coats, making sure my hands didn’t shake.”

Leigh Rosser was similarly nonplused while describing his biggest challenge as design fabrication lead. Problem: How to get a dragon and a cloud to fly above a grand staircase in “ My Father’s Dragon .” Solution: “It’s really simple, conceptually” — it didn’t sound simple — “but we’re dealing with weight in the thousands of pounds, mounted up high. We make up things that haven’t been done before, or at least that I’m not aware of.”

Attention to detail extends to floor-bound exhibits. The utensil drawer in “Blueberries for Sal” holds Pete Cowdin’s mother’s egg whisk alongside a jar containing a baby tooth that belonged to Cowdin and Pettid’s oldest daughter, Sally. The tooth is a wink at “ One Morning in Maine ,” an earlier Robert McCloskey book involving a wiggly bicuspid — or was it a molar? If dental records are available, Cowdin and Pettid have consulted them for accuracy.

“With Pete and Deb, it’s about trying to picture what they’re seeing in their minds,” said Brian Selznick , a longtime friend who helped stock the shelves in the Lucky Rabbit. He’s the author of “ The Invention of Hugo Cabret ,” among many other books.

Three months ago, the grotto looked like a desert rock formation studded with pink Chiclets. The burrow, home of Fox Rabbit, the museum’s eponymous mascot, was dark except for sparks blasting from a soldering iron. The floor was covered with tiny metal letters reclaimed from a newly-renovated donor wall at a local museum.

Cowdin and Pettid proudly explained their works-in-progress; these were the parts of the museum that blossomed from seed in their imaginations. But to the naked eye, they had the charm of a bulkhead door leading to a scary basement.

When the museum opened to the public, the grotto and the burrow suddenly made sense. The pink Chiclets are books, more than 3000 of them — molded in silicone, cast in resin — incorporated into the walls, the stairs and the floor. They vary from an inch-and-a-half to three inches thick. As visitors descend into the Rabbit Hole, they can run their fingers over the edges of petrified volumes. They can clamber over rock formations that include layers of books. Or they can curl up and read.

Dennis Butt, another longtime Rabbit Hole employee, molded 92 donated books into the mix, including his own copies of “ The Hobbit ” and “ The Lord of the Rings .” He said, “They’re a little piece of me.”

As for the metal letters, they’re pressed into the walls of a blue-lit tunnel leading up a ramp to the first floor. They spell the first lines of 141 books, including “ Charlotte’s Web ,” “Devil in the Drain” and “ Martha Speaks .” Some were easier to decipher than others, but “Mashed potatoes are to give everybody enough” jumped out. It called to mind another line from “A Hole is to Dig,” Ruth Krauss’s book of first definitions (illustrated by a young Maurice Sendak ): “The world is so you have something to stand on.”

At the Rabbit Hole, books are so you have something to stand on. They’re the bedrock and the foundation; they’re the solid ground.

Cowdin and Pettid have plans to expand into three more floors, adding exhibit space, a print shop, a story lab, a resource library and discovery galleries. An Automat-style cafeteria and George and Martha -themed party and craft room will open soon. A rooftop bar is also in the works.

Of course, museum life isn’t all happily ever after. Certain visitors whined, whinged and wept, especially as they approached the exit. One weary adult said, “Charlie, we did it all.”

Then, “Charlie, it’s time to go.”

And finally, “Fine, Charlie, we’re leaving you here.” Cue hysteria.

But the moral of this story — and the point of the museum, and maybe the point of reading, depending on who you share books with — crystallized in a quiet moment in the great green room. A boy in a Chiefs Super Bowl T-shirt pretended to fall asleep beneath a fleecy blanket. Before closing his eyes, he said, “Goodnight, Grandma. Love you to the moon.”

Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years. More about Elisabeth Egan

The Great Read

Here are more fascinating tales you can’t help reading all the way to the end..

When an illegal smoke shop opened across the street, an Upper West Side councilwoman, vowed to close it. What happened next was “like a Fellini movie.”

The diabetes drug Ozempic has become a phenomenon, and its inescapable jingle — a takeoff of the Pilot song “Magic” — has played a big part in its story .

A man’s five-year stay at the New Yorker Hotel cost him only $200.57. Now it might cost him his freedom .

Researchers are documenting deathbed visions , a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.

Around 2020, the “right” pants began to swing from skinny to wide. But is there even a consensus around trends anymore ?

Filter by Keywords

Book Summaries

‘make your bed’ book summary: review and key takeaways.

Sudarshan Somanathan

Head of Content

April 16, 2024

Before you read the book, the act of making your bed may not seem like a fulfilling task that evokes a feeling of accomplishment when completed. It is a mundane chore at best.

However, Admiral William Mc Raven, in his book Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World says otherwise . He presents it as a deep metaphor for handling life’s toughest moments. He talks about how small, deliberate actions can be a window to a life of discipline, resilience, and fulfillment. 

Make Your Bed takes readers on a journey of self-improvement, helping them unravel the secrets to conquering adversities.

In this Make Your Bed book summary, we pick out the nuggets of vital learnings from the treasure trove of life lessons from the toughest military training programs in the world—the SEAL training.

• Make Your Bed: The Book at a Glance

1. Start the day off by making your bed

2. find someone to help you paddle, 3. measure a person by the size of their heart, 4. get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward, 5. don’t be afraid of the circuses, 6. slide down the obstacle head-first, 7. don’t back down from the sharks, 8. be your very best in the darkest moments, 9. start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud, 10. don’t ever, ever ring the bell, popular quotes from make your bed: little things that can change your life…and maybe the world, start the day with a task completed, small, deliberate actions cultivate discipline, find someone to help you paddle, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud, slide down the obstacle head-first, only the size of your heart matters.

• Excel in Making Your Bed— and Much More—with ClickUp

Make Your Bed : The Book at a Glance

The book Make Your Bed originated from a profound commencement speech by Admiral William H. McRaven. While addressing the graduates of The University of Texas, Austin, the Navy veteran shared his insights from SEAL training and how it contributes to character building. It is an inspirational guide emphasizing the values of success, resilience, and persistence while navigating life’s challenges.

Before diving into the depths of Make Your Bed summary, here’s a quick overview of the book:

• Author : Admiral William H. McRaven
• No. of Pages : 144 pages
• Goodreads Rating : 4.0/5.0 
• Year Published : April 4, 2017 (First edition)
• Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
• Estimated Reading Time : 2.5 hours
• Listening Length : 2 hours

Essential Lessons from Make Your Bed Book by William H. McRaven

In Make Your Bed , Admiral William McRaven draws inspiration from his experiences during the Navy SEAL training to share valuable life lessons.

Here are 10 lessons from the book that will transform your personal and professional goals :

McRaven opens by talking about how his instructors, who were SEAL combat veterans, would inspect the beds first thing in the morning. A well-made bed had square corners, tight covers, a centered pillow positioned just below the headboard, and an extra blanket folded neatly at the base of the rack.

The daily habit was no challenge for those willing to undergo a strenuous 6-month basic training to become Navy SEALs. However, it had a lasting impact on their psyche.

Making the bed set a positive tone for their day. It is a sign of discipline and offers a sense of pride—you complete a task as soon as the day begins! The feeling of accomplishment bright and early will motivate you to conquer the following tasks until the day’s done.

Even on bad days when you do not experience the ripple effect of productivity, you can always come back to a bed made and take solace that tomorrow would be better.

It highlights how sometimes the simple act of making your bed correctly could be the foundation of excellence and a positive attitude. Committing to small tasks with precision and consistency cultivates habits that influence larger aspects of our lives. 

McRaven then focuses on the importance of teamwork. 

He talks about how Navy SEAL students were divided into boat crews of seven to paddle a small rubber boat miles down the West Coast. Six students, three on each side, were responsible for the paddling, while one would take charge as the coxswain.

Navigating the Pacific Ocean coast was no easy feat, unlike making a bed, with the winter surf peaking 8-10 feet high. Everyone had to work together. Those paddling had to exert equal effort to keep the boat balanced and moving. Similarly, the coxswain (the person in charge of a boat) had to synchronize every paddle stroke and expertly navigate the seas.

The idea that you must find someone to help you paddle is a testament to a universal human experience—success is rarely a solitary endeavor. Those looking to change the world must rely on strong relationships and a supportive network to make the voyage more manageable.

Working in a team requires trust, communication, and mutual reliance to navigate personal and professional complexities. Seeking help in these moments will improve the likelihood of triumph and ease the burden of the journey.

So, make as many friends as possible and help them as they help you. After all, true strength lies in unity.

Continuing with the above anecdote, Admiral William McRaven talks about how the class of 150 students dwindled to a mere 42 in just a few weeks of Navy SEAL training. With just seven boat crews remaining, everyone wanted to belong to the crew with the tall, buff guys.

However, the most exceptional performers were a bunch of ‘misfits’—called the munchkin crew.

The munchkin crew included an American Indian, an African American, a Polish American, a Greek American, an Italian American, and two kids from the Midwest, all five feet five inches or less. However, they outdo all the other teams in paddling, swimming, and running. 

This Navy SEAL training was a humbling experience for the big guys who made fun of the little flippers the munchkins put on, only to eat their dust later. It made McRaven realize that no external appearance, social parameter, or superficial metrics can grade someone’s grit, endurance, and willpower.

Success depends on daring greatly, and the munchkins proved that only the size of their hearts matters as it dramatically overshadows the size of their flippers.

Next in the Navy SEAL training came the part where the instructors carried out a weekly uniform inspection. The evaluation was meticulous and stringent, with very high standards to match.

Students had to have a perfectly starched hat, an immaculately ironed uniform, and a shiny, smudge-free belt buckle to pass this inspection. The students gave it their all, but the instructors would discover something amiss despite their hard work. 

Cue the punishment.

Students then had to brave the surf zone, fully clothed. Once they were wet from the head to their toes, they had to roll around on the beach until they were caked in sand. They called this sugar cookie. The sugar cookies had to stay in this state throughout the day: cold, wet, and gritty with sand. 

Of course, it was discouraging to several students who became sugar cookies no matter how they tried. They didn’t understand that the system was created to make everyone a sugar cookie. The lesson was that failure is a part of life, and you must learn how to roll with the punches. The objective is to get over the self-pity and keep moving forward.

Continuing with the theme of accepting failure as a possible outcome of an endeavor, McRaven discusses the circus list.

The Navy SEAL training is physically and mentally challenging. Students must participate in activities like long runs, obstacle courses, long swims, hours of calisthenics, and more.

Each activity had specified standards to be met within a prescribed schedule. Failure to do this would result in being placed on the circus list. The list was posted at the end of the day, and those shortlisted had to put in two additional hours of calisthenics.

Ending up on the circus meant two things:

• Your performance didn’t measure up for the day
• You’re going to be more fatigued the following day, which could potentially subdue your performance—enough to get you on the next day’s circus list

Nobody wanted to be on the circus list, but there were a few recurring names. The extra two hours of calisthenics strengthened them even more. The pain forged strength and resilience.

McRaven believes that life is full of circuses and that failing will be painful. However, failures teach us resilience and persistence, making us stronger and one step closer to success.

Students had to run an obstacle course at least twice weekly during the Navy SEAL training.

The obstacle course featured 25 obstacles, such as a 10-foot wall, 30-foot cargo net, barbwire crawl, and more. However, the most intimidating of the lot was the Slide for Life.

It had a three-tiered 30-foot tower at one end and a single-tier tower at the other, between which was a 200-foot-long rope. Trainees had to climb the larger tower, grab the rope, and reach the other end. They would suspend their bodies under the rope and inch across, pulling their body weight hand after hand.

Until one day, one brave trainee mounted the top of the rope and launched himself head-first down the line. This seemingly foolish and risky approach helped him break the record for the obstacle!

Setting aside the mechanics or logistics of the approach, it becomes evident that tackling challenges head-on directly and assertively is more effective in charting the path to success. 

Rather than allowing fear and uncertainty to cloud our judgment, we must visualize challenges as opportunities to grow and learn. Head-on confrontation of these challenges cultivates resilience and grit, preparing us for anything life throws our way. 

During the land warfare phase of basic SEAL training, students are flown to San Clemente Island, just off the coast of San Diego. The waters here are breeding grounds for great white sharks.

To pass the SEAL training, students must complete long swims, some even in the pitch dark of the night. Before departing on this journey, instructors would brief the students on the different species of sharks inhabiting the waters.

They start by assuring students that no shark has ever eaten anybody. Then, they share some survival skills, such as standing your ground if a shark starts circling your position.

The instructors tell the students to avoid swimming away or acting afraid, as sharks can sense fear. Finally, if a shark were to attack, students are taught to punch them on the snout with all their might. This will cause them to turn and swim away.

Equipped with this knowledge, the students swim through the shark-infested waters and complete their tasks.

Through this, McRaven teaches the lessons of courage and steadfastness. You’ll come across several sharks in your life—that’s inevitable. The goal is to remain calm while facing these formidable challenges.

In the next part of ‘ Make Your Bed ,’ McRaven gives some background on how Navy SEALs perform underwater attacks. A pair of SEAL divers are dropped off outside the enemy harbor. These divers only have a compass and a DEF gauge to guide them to the target as they swim two miles underwater.

During a large portion of this swim, they have moonlight, ambient light, and surrounding streetlamps to illuminate the way. Plus, they are comfortable knowing they’re swimming in open waters.

However, as they draw closer to the target ship, the vessel blocks the light. Since the objective of the exercise is to find the ship’s keel, the divers have to get to the deepest parts.

Making your way to the darkest part of the ship, devoid of light and overwhelmed by the loud sounds of the ship’s machinery, is one of the most anxious moments of the mission. The effect can be mentally disturbing to the extent that it jeopardizes the mission.

But in these darkest moments, the Navy SEALs must remember to stay focused and composed. Stepping out from such dark moments helps them recall their physical prowess, tactical skills, and inner strength and emerge as victors. 

This poignant lesson highlights how the dark moment illuminates our true character. Strive to be your best even in difficult times, and you will cultivate the perseverance to thrive in adversity.

The ninth week of SEAL training is known as Hell Week. This seven-day endurance test involves no sleep or rest and constant physical and mental harassment.

On the Wednesday of Hell Week, students are taken to a swampy patch called the mudflats. They must endure 15 hours in the mudflats battling the howling winds, freezing cold, and the instructors’ pressure to quit SEAL training.

McRaven’s Hell Week had his class dig deep in the cold mud and sit in these holes as the sun began to set—a punishment for an infraction. The mud closed in on all students, with only their heads above the ground.

The instructors told the class they would let everyone out of the mud if five men quit. They still had about eight hours of training left and the night’s cold to bear. Naturally, several trainees looked like they were about to quit.

Until one loud voice rang out in a song. The song was out of tune but enthusiastic, causing others to start singing. Somehow, this simple rebellion tuned out all the discomforts and gave people hope to endure the mudflats.

McRaven reminds us that we will find ourselves neck-deep in mud someday. However, success depends on giving people hope. Those who dare greatly ignite hope and possess the power to change the world.

The final lesson in Make Your Bed is never to ring the bell.

In the SEALs training campus, a brass bell hangs in the compound’s center. The bell is for all students to see—it is their key to quitting the training and returning to a life where they no longer have to follow bed-making code, become a sugar cookie, swim with sharks, or sit neck-deep in mud. Ringing the bell gets you out.

Despite the lure of a life of normalcy where every day is no longer a test of endurance, McRaven advises against ringing the bell. After all, ringing the bell is a metaphor for surrendering, submitting to challenges, and abandoning their goal. By refusing to ring the bell, individuals can set immovable goals , tap into strong resolve, and persevere through hardships until they reach success. 

Here are a few popular quotes from the book Make Your Bed :

I know that anything I achieved in my life was a result of others who have helped me along the way.

The common people and the great men and women are all defined by how they deal with life’s unfairness: Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, Malala Yousafzai, and—Moki Martin. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, no matter how good you are, you still end up as a sugar cookie. Don’t complain. Don’t blame it on your misfortune. Stand tall, look to the future, and drive on!

Hope is the most powerful force in the universe.

Making my bed correctly was not going to be an opportunity for praise. It was expected of me. It was my first task of the day, and doing it right was important. It demonstrated my discipline. It showed my attention to detail, and at the end of the day, it would be a reminder that I had done something well, something to be proud of, no matter how small the task.

Quitting never makes anything easier.

How to Apply Learnings from the ‘ Make Your Bed’ Book with ClickUp

A project manager’s day starts by setting the agenda, organizing activities, conducting team meetings, taking stock of any backlog, and catching up on emails and messages. These are routine tasks but crucial nonetheless—something as symbolic as making your bed!

Use ClickUp to set daily goals , centralize communications, manage change requests, and orchestrate tasks and activities. The self-discipline of following the routine methodically helps you start the day with a completed task!

Staying on top of these everyday responsibilities kickstarts the day positively and helps you check one item after another off your list.

Use ClickUp’s Task Management to organize your tasks. Set deadlines, assign priorities, identify dependencies, create recurring tasks, notify stakeholders, and more.

ClickUp allows you to track and complete tasks, follow through on your commitments and cultivate a sense of discipline in your work. Your team will also appreciate the order and structure available through ClickUp.

They will also be more engaged in the work at hand as they visualize the impact of every activity in goal attainment as teams inch towards the larger objective. 

ClickUp is all about teamwork and collaboration. It is a highly versatile platform that allows businesses to set up shared workspaces so that teams can collectively organize tasks, documents, and communication over a centralized location. Such an arrangement breaks through siloes and allows everyone to paddle together.

ClickUp supports various communication channels, such as chat, comments, and notes, through which team members can discuss project specifics, share updates, and collaborate.

Teams can come together and brainstorm ideas using ClickUp Whiteboard or commit to creating, editing, and collaborating on documents using ClickUp Docs .

All in all, ClickUp is a collaboration powerhouse that will help you tame the highest surfs!

Regarding collaboration, ClickUp makes it possible through intentional, meaningful, and value-loaded communication.

Communication is the song that keeps the morale high when things get challenging. It offers assurance when projects turn awry and things look bleak.

ClickUp patches teams together through various communication channels to help them sing to each other. The Chat View allows teams to communicate with each other in real-time, while ClickUp Email Management takes care of asynchronous communication.

So, whether it is sharing updates or announcing the fallback on Plan B, ClickUp ensures that the teams are all singing the same tune while braving the winds.

In Make Your Bed , McRaven encourages readers to approach challenges proactively. ClickUp supports this mindset through effective goal-setting.

ClickUp Goals allow users to take on challenges head-on by breaking them down into smaller, manageable tasks.

The resulting work breakdown structure with specific and measurable targets allows teams to face complex problems or projects with tight deadlines fearlessly. Teams can set daily, weekly, and monthly goals and automatically track their progress in real-time.

Effective goal management also contributes to project flexibility, as you can respond to change requests instantly and execute a change management plan by revising the goals.

They say success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing heart.

ClickUp allows teams to dare move on while ensuring that one’s faith remains unshakeable. Use ClickUp Dashboards to measure and track various metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Even if your project is slow to take off, ClickUp allows you to reevaluate all your moves and activities. This allows you to stay on track for continuous improvement and eliminate the fear of failure. Acknowledging failures and treating them as an opportunity for learning will help you forge forward.

Excel in Making Your Bed — and Much More — with ClickUp

Make Your Bed is an excellent story of discipline, perseverance, and fortitude. Don’t just read the book; apply its ten lessons in your personal and professional life, and you’ll be no less than a Navy SEAL in whatever you choose to do.

Train your military units using tools like ClickUp until they no longer fear failure and make their metaphorical bed perfectly. Sign up for free to learn more!

Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.

Receive the latest WriteClick Newsletter updates.

Thanks for subscribing to our blog!

Please enter a valid email

• Free training & 24-hour support
• Serious about security & privacy
• 99.99% uptime the last 12 months