‘I was living in the life of this book’

Author Hanya Yanagihara on the role of imagination, the asymmetries of power and why she never reads reviews.

Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara’s critically-acclaimed 734-page novel, A Little Life , was written in 18 months, and has provoked strong reactions for its depictions of violence. The book explores the friendship between four men, one of whom was sexually abused as a child. Yanagihara says that while she wrote it in a state of ‘a fever dream’, she had been thinking of the novel for a long time, ever since she started collecting images 14 years ago. They range from Diane Arbus photographs to The New York Times Magazine covers to the interiors of motels by Todd Hido. The images provided a kind of ‘tonal sound check’, she writes, ‘a visual diary’, which she sees as inextricable from the life of the novel.

Your first book, The People in the Trees, was such a powerful work of the imagination — you invented a Micronesian nation and the entirety of its flora and fauna in such precise detail. Tell us about the process of creating this universe and the role of imagination in your work.

I had a strong sense of what I wanted the island to

feel like, but I couldn’t quite see what it looked like. I grew up in Hawaii, but I knew that the jungles there weren’t frightening enough: there are in fact forests as dense and as unknowable and as threatening as the one I wanted to create for Ivu’ivu, but — perhaps because I was familiar with them — I couldn’t imagine them, quite, as terrifying, as greedy. Then, in 2008 or so, I was visiting Angra dos Reis, the archipelago midway between Rio and Sao Paulo, and was taken by boat to a small island where I’d be spending the night. The minute I saw this little bit of land, I knew this was what I wanted Ivu’ivu to feel like — there was something rapacious about the tropical forest there, something hungry and consumptive. I wasn’t there for long, but it was one of those places that you could tell resented any human intrusions. The jungle was constantly being beaten back, but with the understanding that ultimately, it would triumph, that man was but a visitor there and attempts to control nature would be futile.

A Little Life was published just two years later, and is a completely different kind of beast. Can you describe the actual physical challenges on your body and mind to write this unrelenting book as quickly as you did?

When I look back at emails I wrote to my best friend during this period — we live in the same city, but exchange a long email every night — I can see how deeply I was living in the life of this book, how far I had drifted from my own life. At the time, though, I didn’t (and couldn’t) examine it as an experience: it was what I was doing, and I accepted that this was what it was. I remember, mostly, how disciplined I was, and how fortunate I was to have my job, to have something that pulled me out of this book for nine hours a day, some place I could go where the problems were everyday and solvable and reassuring. In many ways, it was the perfect period in which to write; I had a job I understood and knew how to do well, and my first book had been bought but not published. I knew I could write another book, and yet there were no external pressures on me to do so.

Both books deal with paedophilia and sexual abuse, both resist a redemptive arc, what is it about this particular violence that you feel drawn to exploring and leaving unresolved?

I’m not sure that I deliberately tried for an unresolved ending. I think the endings for both books are honest. They end the only way they could end. As for child sexual abuse, it’s not a topic I’m interested in. What I am interested in is abuses of power. Many novels are, to some extent, about an imbalance of power: between two people, or a person and the state, or a person and the church. This kind of abuse interests me because the mismatch between the two individuals is so profound: one person has the superior strength, logic, resources, knowledge, and vocabulary. The other has none. It’s that mismatch that makes this particular abuse so damaging, and its outcome so depressingly clear.

You’ve talked about the need for writers to allow themselves literary transgressions. What gives you the confidence to enter these potential quicksands?

I think it’s because I’m not part of any kind of literary tradition or school or community: it’s always easier to break rules when you don’t know the rules you’re not supposed to break. Also, I don’t read reviews, or anything about my work. I know many writers do, and I don't know how they do it — I think they’re made of steelier stuff than I am. But I made the decision before my first book was published that I’d never read anything, and I never have. Pico Iyer once told me: “The good ones are never good enough, and the bad ones stay with you forever.” I suspect he’s right.

Tishani Doshi is a writer and dancer. Her most recent book is The Adulterous Citizen: Poems, Stories, Essays.