Hanya's Boys

The novelist tends to torture her gay male characters—but only so she can swoop in to save them.

- By Andrea Long Chu, Photography by Amanda Demme

BY THE TIME you finish reading A Little Life, you will have spent a whole book waiting for a man to kill himself. The novel, the second from author Hanya Yanagihara, begins as a light chronicle of male friendship among four college graduates in New York before narrowing its focus to Jude, a corporate litigator whose decadeslong struggle to repress a childhood of unrelenting torments—he was raised by pedophiles in a monastery, kidnapped and prostituted in motels, molested by counselors at an orphanage, kidnapped again, tortured, raped, starved, and run over with a car—ends in his suicide.

An unlikely beach read with a gothic riptide, A Little Life became a massive best seller in 2015. Critics lavished praise on the book, with one declaring it the long-awaited “great gay novel” for its unsparing approach to Jude, who falls in love with his male best friend. (A rare pan in The New York Review of Books prompted an indignant letter from Yanagihara’s editor.) A Little Life would go on to win the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize; in December, readers of the New York Times nominated it next to finalists like Beloved and 1984 for best book of the past 125 years.

Yanagihara’s motivations remained mysterious. The author was born in Los Angeles to a third-generation Hawaiian Japanese father and a Seoul-born Korean mother. She has lived in Manhattan since her 20s, but her heart is in Tokyo and Hawaii. (She has called that state “the closest thing Asian Americans have to Harlem.”) Her first novel, 2013’s