A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

months ago, and he now had almost eleven paintings completed

right,” Julia said, and as she explained to him the controversies surrounding her and her colleagues’ work, he glanced

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life.

Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.

Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of

getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Everything he has learned tells him to leave; everything he has wished for tells him to stay. Be brave, he tells himself. Be brave for once. And so he looks back at Caleb. “Let’s go,” he says, and although he is already frightened, he begins the long walk down the narrow hallway

“Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be.”

point of a child is not what you hope he will accomplish in your name but the pleasure that he will bring you, whatever form it comes in, even if it is a form that is barely recognizable as pleasure at all—and, more important, the pleasure you will be privileged to bring him.

bathroom, the one in Jude’s room, which had been leaking. He did, tightened

His hands shook more than ever, and he felt sharp prickles vibrating through his fingers, but she

“Jude,” Willem said, after a pause, “come lie down next to me before you go,” but he

something. The question was what you sacrificed. He knew that