A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

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.

My life, he will think, my life. But he won’t be able to think beyond this, and he will keep repeating the words to himself—part chant, part curse, part reassurance—as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life.

Fairness itself seemed to hold little interest for him, which I found fascinating, as people, especially young people, are very interested in what’s fair. Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields. Jacob, back when he was able to go to school and learn things and think and speak, knew what fairness was and that it was important, something to be valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

There had been periods in his twenties when he would look at his friends and feel such a pure, deep contentment that he would wish the world around them would simply cease, that none of them would have to move from that moment, when everything was in equilibrium and his affection for them was perfect.

Just this once, he implores whoever in the world is responsible for punishing him for his bad behavior. Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.

the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

He was his friend. His job was to treat him as he wanted to be treated, not as a subject to be spied on.

Do you know how special you are? Do you know what a difference you could make if you stayed?

He wanted to live somewhere where the elevator worked. He wanted to take cabs when he wanted to. He wanted to find somewhere private to swim, because the motion stilled his back and because he wasn’t able to take his walks any longer.

“Everyone I’ve Ever Known Everyone I’ve Ever Loved Everyone I’ve Ever Hated Everyone I’ve Ever Fucked”

Children are a kind of cartography, and all one has to do is obey the map they present to you on the day they are born.

This is what you get for pretending to be someone you know you’re not, for thinking you’re as good as other people.

We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they

might be worse.

Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke,

our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again.

whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that

came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?