eenkleinleven
ivo van hove sued for emotional damages
this blog is both about the book A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and the production of it, directed by Ivo Van Hove.
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ok but now we're saying it.
Hey hey, so it seems that unfortunately it is a lesser known fact that Hanya Yanagihara doesn’t identify as straight and has a rather complex relationship with gender.
She is often generalized as just another “straight woman” profiting off of queer men in literature, but if she’s going to be critiqued, I rather it be accurate to who she is rather than an assumption based off of a stereotype.
She is a queer woc which seems to be often ignored or simply unknown in discourse around A Little Life.
A Little Life is complex as is the author herself. There’s more nuance than “this is bad rep” or “this is good rep” as well as “this person is gay” or “this person is straight”.
Make sure your critiques, as well as praises, are accurate and based off of fact rather than assumption, especially when it comes to an artist/author’s real life character and values. Context and dramaturgical research is important!
Here’s a link to the New Yorker interview where she discusses these facets of herself:
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Hey hey, so it seems that unfortunately it is a lesser known fact that Hanya Yanagihara doesn’t identify as straight and has a rather complex relationship with gender.
She is often generalized as just another “straight woman” profiting off of queer men in literature, but if she’s going to be critiqued, I rather it be accurate to who she is rather than an assumption based off of a stereotype.
She is a queer woc which seems to be often ignored or simply unknown in discourse around A Little Life.
A Little Life is complex as is the author herself. There’s more nuance than “this is bad rep” or “this is good rep” as well as “this person is gay” or “this person is straight”.
Make sure your critiques, as well as praises, are accurate and based off of fact rather than assumption, especially when it comes to an artist/author’s real life character and values. Context and dramaturgical research is important!
Here’s a link to the New Yorker interview where she discusses these facets of herself:
#somehow this is the first time i've read this article#BUT i did see that exhibit at the frick#great read; thanks for posting!
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this is literally willem’s entire characterization if anyone was wondering
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Jude after accepting the job from Rosen Pritchard
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Some of the critiques people make about Hanya strike me mostly as misogynistic jabs founded on a basis of not taking her seriously as an author because she’s a woman who writes about men. The above is just a concise example of something I’ve seen time and again, so I’m using it to illustrate a point.
There have been many books published where men have sex with each other and those predate Ao3 because there is a world outside of the internet. Like, novels. Novellas. Serious writing. Gay men have sex with each other–that isn’t something women made up to write fanfiction about it. That’s real.
I don’t know how to say this, but Hanya Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T Magazine, which focuses on fashion, culture, and art. She actually interacts with and is friends with gay men, and knows more about the lived lives of gay men than any perpetually online poster critiquing her for writing men with more depth than a standard Netflix Original character. I just know with absolute certainty that if she had written about women suffering, no one would argue that it wasn’t “believable”.
A Little Life is a lot of things, but it is not a novel written without research. It is not thoughtless. You might find it disturbing, and the world it describes may be totally foreign to you, but serious literary critique cannot take place without a firm dedication to taking the work seriously.
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my honest reaction
not to be a hater but i read a review on GoodReads about the book "a little life" because id heard about it so much i was starting to get bad vibes and stopped trusting all the people who loved it so much so i went and checked, and this review said the author didn't seem to know anything about queer people nor want to dive into any depth about the characters portrayed as queer (thus, essentially, putting them in the book to be queer and nothing else) and that really put into perspective and launched me into understanding so hard i got whiplash WHY it is that all the people i see singing the books praises are millennial straight (usually white) women. every single one the type of woman who would want a gay best friend. cementing that i will be anti "a little life" to the end of time
#there are MANY gay men who love this book. myself included#also the implication that the editor in chief for T Magazine doesn't know anything about gay people...............#the smith college graduate......#goodreads is not a representative sample of anything but goodreads users. sorry!
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do you happen to have any julia head canons?! <3
again, apologies for how horrendously late this is. But yes! I have many headcanons for Julia, and I've been gaining more as I explore her character a lot in my fics. She's such an underrated character and I absolutely adore her
Here are my Julia headcanons
- Adores art. She and JB would talk the most with each other at Thanksgivings, and she’d listen intently to him relaying the going-ons of the art world. She’s the one responsible for most of the art bought and hung in both their Cambridge house and their Truro house.
- Her brother is younger than her and they’re very close. She’s the one who got him into art which led him to becoming an art history professor.
- Unable to have children. Similarly to Adele, who had no biological children, Julia considered Jude to be her child.
- Her mother walked out on their family when she was very young. Julia barely remembers her, but it was a heartbreak in her childhood. Her father never remarried.
- Stayed in the States because of Harold. She’d gotten a job offer for a lab based in London and had been considering returning to England around the time she met him, but as their relationship developed, she decided to stay.
- Had so many pets growing up. Birds and cats and dogs and hamsters. Her last pet was an aged Jack Russell Terrier that she’d named Agatha. Agatha passed when Julia was in Year 12.
- Was the one who suggested what would eventually become the Truro house. She and Harold had been considering purchasing a vacation home for about a year when she was told of the house by an acquaintance in real estate. She and Harold immediately loved it.
- She was the one who asked Harold out when they met. Harold was still tender from his divorce with Liesl and was hesitant to get into another relationship. After Harold became friends with Julia, she asked him to see an opera together and he agreed. They had such a wonderful time together that he asked her on a second date.
- For most of her life, she’d kept her hair very short. She preferred it that way, as it was easier to manage and kept it out of her face. But when she was fifteen, she wanted to experiment with her look and so she grew it longer to her shoulders. She absolutely hated it and chopped it off in the bathroom sink. Ever since, she’s kept it short.
- She doesn’t like most typical British foods. However, she is very fond of British sweets and pastries. In Particular, Victoria Sponge Cake is her favourite and she would have it every year on her birthday.
- It was actually through her many pets that she would meet her childhood friend Dennys. His father was the veterinarian who cared for one of her cats.
- Despite being very pale, she tans surprisingly well. Sunburns are very uncommon for her.
- The Saint Jude statue that Willem bought for them got moved around a lot in the house. It eventually found its permanent spot on Julia’s dressing table.
- Has a high tolerance for spicy foods, but doesn’t really like them.
- Julia has a very good fashion sense. In secondary school, she was voted the most fashionable by her peers. Despite not often keeping up with fashion trends, she’s always very well-put together and fashionable. After several years of being married, Harold still finds himself speechless with awe seeing her when she’s gotten ready for an event or an outing.
- She didn’t sleep for weeks after finding out about Jude’s cutting. She would lay awake and stare at her phone and try to will herself to call him. But she couldn’t. She was, as they all were, afraid of driving him away or saying the wrong thing. It remained her biggest regret, especially after he passed.
- Loves to cook. Julia often found her love language to be in her cooking, though she wasn’t as intense about it the way Jude was. When they were friends and in the early months of them dating each other, one of the things Julia and Harold bonded over was their love for Italian food. She tried to teach him how to cook once and it took hours (and many open windows) until the burning smell left the house. When they adopted Jude, Julia often cared for him through cooking. She always stayed with him in the kitchen whenever he cooked. She always tried, in subtle ways, to feed him more when he visited.
- Actually really enjoys Willem’s movies. While a lot of them love Willem’s movies mostly for the fact that Willem is starring in them, rather than the movie itself, she actually greatly enjoys the movies and often rewatches them. She was ecstatic when Willem asked her to be his date to the award show.
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based on this post i am forced to conclude that the situation on booktok is clearly much worse than i feared. literacy rates on the app are approaching levels not seen since the medieval period
I'm literally so obsessed with people shitting on A Little Life. Have I read that shit? Hell no. Am I fascinated that someone would write a book with the thesis of 'kill yourself'? Hell yes.
#it's an interesting question but not one that applies to a little life#because she did not write the book being described here
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