“It never occurred to me to write something people want to read”: a profile of the best-selling author and magazine editor Hanya Yanagihara.
“The People in the Trees,” as she titled the book, was a political and moral novel. She wanted to interrogate “the binarian proposition” that people are either good or evil, and to square “a person who did and discovered extraordinary things with a person who caused great pain and was deeply flawed.
The living room was split by an enormous double-sided bookcase with some ten thousand books on it. Yanagihara pointed out some early-American furniture that her father, who is now seventy-six, had given her. One was a tester bed from the eighteen-tens: she slept in it as a child, and still does. Another was a Philadelphia Chippendale chair. Both items were out of fashion, and therefore worth nothing, she said, but that’s not why they mattered to her.
These brutalities are told in flashback, but the relief that Jude’s present life seems to promise doesn’t last. “I don’t think happiness is for me,” he says, though his friends tenderly insist otherwise. He begins to date a man—who rapes and beats him. “Every year, his right to humanness diminished,” Jude reflects about himself. Turning his shame inward, he engages in self-mutilation. Many writers would only allude to such episodes, but Yanagihara narrates them extensively.
The novel also inspired a conversation about the gay experience and how it was portrayed in American fiction. Yanagihara told me that she wasn’t even sure that Jude and Willem, the actor, who become involved toward the end of the book, would see themselves as gay, but that hadn’t stopped the novelist Garth Greenwell from declaring, in, that “A Little Life” was “an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America.
Yanagihara said that she’d once been in therapy but found it useless: she had come with a concrete question, not a request for an intrusive mental workup. “I wanted advice,” she told me. “And they mostly refused to give it.” A romantic friendship was in a difficult spot, and she wanted “instructions for how to fall out of love.”
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
Similar News:Vous pouvez également lire des articles d'actualité similaires à celui-ci que nous avons collectés auprès d'autres sources d'information.
Stop Writing Documentation That No One Reads - Know Your Audience | Hacker Noon'Stop Writing Documentation That No One Reads - Know Your Audience' by AgencyCecil technicaldocumentation userresearch
Lire la suite »
Broaden your scientific audience with video animationAcademic writing can go only so far. Use video and animations in plain language to explain why your research matters, says Alvina Lai.
Lire la suite »
Discovery Buys Minority Stake in Open AP in Bid To Gain Say in Audience MeasurementAfter making a successful bid to grow its heft in the media business with the looming acquisition of WarnerMedia, Discovery wants to extend its influence in the world of audience measurement and da…
Lire la suite »
Discovery Buys Stake in Advanced TV Ad Joint Venture OpenAP'Discovery is excited to take an active role shaping the future of advanced audience buying' by taking a minority stake in the venture of Fox, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS.
Lire la suite »
'Full House' star Bob Saget dead at 65Bob Saget, the comedian and actor arguably known best by audiences as wholesome patriarch Danny Tanner on the sitcom 'Full House,' has died, his family confirmed in a statement to CNN.
Lire la suite »
Golden Globes: Winners from this year’s boycotted eventSunday’s Golden Globes took place without a red carpet, an audience or even a televised broadcast following a year of widespread criticism about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s diversity and ethics issues.
Lire la suite »