"A sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace. 

Sad seems like a very small word. I was warned that is book was "sad", but this book is not sad. It is anguished. It is desolate, desperate, and inconsolable. It was inconceivably horrifying, not just within context but also when you realize that the events portrayed within its pages are not fiction to many.

A Little Life is really the story of Jude, a man who has set himself apart as a genius and incredibly talented litigator, but who is scarred both physically and mentally by an unspeakable childhood. A Little Life covers his life from college to middle-age; his friends, family, experiences, trials and growth. It tells of how his story touches and shapes so many others.

The inside jacket copy ends with this, and I do not feel I can summarize better: "Hanya Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance".

I would especially like to reiterate the last line, "a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance", because if there is one thing that I stood in awe of while reading is how so much could happen to one singular person and how he could possibly find the room within himself to box it away, as best he could, and continue functioning, let alone living. The cruelty, over and over, that one man had to face through his life was wrong. I would say unfair, but a passage in the book explains our fascination with that word and that it would be best if we were to dispose of it all together. But it does acknowledge the merits of right and wrong, and what happened/happens to Jude is wrong. Entirely. And the thought that somewhere, multiple places even, on this planet, there are people, children, experiencing what Jude had to, cleaves my heart in two. It makes me want to crawl into every dark place, every hiding place, every motel room and pull them from it; to save them, despite it being already too late. I just... I can't find a place to put this book in my mind. I can't find a way to warp it to where it sits comfortably. It's not possible.

There were shining moments as well, I suppose. A Little Life shows the value of friendship, of having good people, loving people, in your life that you can depend on. You see the beauty of the arts, you see the beauty of the world and of the small, everyday moments that mean more than we give them credit for. You see the power of love, the power to empower those who feel its presence. 

Although I feel I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone I know, I know this story will stay with me longer than anything else I have ever read. 

p.s. I lost count of the f-bombs after I reached 100. I figured that number was significant enough to communicate the language in this book. A Little Life covers topics of sex; rape; physical and sexual abuse; self-mutilation; child molestation and prostitution; and a myriad of simply atrocious and horrifying things that I wish could say were all fiction, but I know better.