A Little Life

A Little Life is an extremely male-focused story. While Jude has a few female friends and an adoptive mother, these characters are not developed at all. The one female character we see interact with Jude extensively, Ana, dies soon after she is introduced. Imagine that one of the female characters in the story is a more significant character, maybe even one whose inner life the author shows like those of Jude, Willem, and Harold. How would this perspective change the tone of the novel?

Which elements of the story seemed most unrealistic to you? Did these unrealistic elements bother you? Why or why not?

Many of the people who are drawn to Jude have themselves experienced great loss. Harold, for instance, lost a child, while Willem lost a brother. Do you think that some people in Jude’s orbit are drawn to him out of a desire to fix him or replace someone they lost? If so, does this motivation cheapen their bond with him, or is it irrelevant to the relationship’s quality?

By the end of the novel, Harold feels like a failure because he could not prevent Jude’s suicide. Do you think that Harold and Jude’s other close friends really did make significant mistakes in caring for him? If so, what were they? If not, what specific things do you think they did that were most helpful?

While A Little Life was critically acclaimed, not all critics had equally positive reviews of it; some found that the dark descriptions of Jude’s cutting and childhood felt voyeuristic, encouraging the reader to gawk at imagined child abuse. Did you feel this way at any point in the novel, or did you find that the novel’s darkest moments served a worthy enough purpose to justify their presence?

After Part 1, which features Willem’s, JB’s, and Malcolm’s perspectives, the narrative confines itself to Jude’s, Willem’s, and, less frequently, Harold’s perspectives. Who else’s perspective would you most like to have explored in Parts 2-7? Why?

In Part 5, Chapter 2, Jude wonders how the people that populated his childhood could be so different from the people who populate his adult life, thinking of the two groups as almost belonging to two different species. Do you think the novel portrays Jude’s childhood abusers (and his main adult tormenter, Caleb), as two-dimensional monsters, or do you think they can be read as more developed characters with complex inner lives and motivations? Why?

If you were Yanagihara’s editor, would you have advised her to make the book shorter? Why or why not? If yes, what passages do you think should be shortened or omitted? If no, explain why you think the book would suffer if anything were removed.