‘Torture porn or serious literature?’: the love-hate phenomenon of cult novel A Little Life

On the cover of the American edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is a photograph by the late Peter Hujar. It shows a handsome young man who, with his eyes screwed shut and his head resting on his hand, looks utterly overcome with despair. Look at the small print and you see that the picture is called Orgasmic Man, one of a series Hujar made in 1969. The man isn’t crying. He’s coming.

It’s a remarkably apt image for a book which has hit the commercial motherlode by wallowing in abject misery. Since it was published in 2015, A Little Life has sold more than 1m copies and is now a bona fide cult classic. There are multiple Reddit threads devoted to it; on Pinterest, people show off their A Little Life-inspired tattoos; and the style magazine i-D recently quoted a woman called Kristin Curtis saying that her friends would send each other selfies while sobbing when they reached the novel’s conclusion. On TikTok, the search terms “A Little Life” and “A Little Life book” have 200m page views between them, although not all of the content is positive. “I would not recommend this book to my worst enemy,” declares declares BookTokker @sivanreads, disapprovingly brandishing her copy, and representing the many readers who were appalled – rather than moved – by this famously divisive text.

Now, a few years after , A Little Life’s superfans can meet by the celebrated Belgian director Ivo van Hove will land on 25 March. When it was first performed in Amsterdam in 2018, the play was four hours long (not surprising, given that the novel weighs in at 720 pages) and in Dutch. That version was performed with subtitles and in New York last year. It has now been condensed somewhat and is in English for the first time, with James Norton, the villain from Happy Valley, playing the tragic central figure, Jude.