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The viral book ‘A Little Life’ handles little with care

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In her column “Brutal Monsters,” Cate Burtner ’25 offers commentary on the literature of mental illness. Content warning: mentions of abuse and self-harm (SH). Hanya Yanagihara’s book “A Little Life” came out in 2015. In 2023, it took the internet by storm. In July 2023, a friend told me that everyone who read it told her the book was “just really sad.” I had just finished reading the highly buzzed novel myself. When I told her about the actual events of the story, she was shocked. “A Little Life” follows four college friends who live in New York City after graduating from a prestigious, unnamed university in New England. We follow their lives from their mid-20s into their 50s, with a central focus on Jude, a lawyer with multiple disabilities who experiences an extreme amount of abuse and trauma from childhood onward. The friend group also includes an actor named Willem (Jude’s love interest), an artist named JB and an architect named Malcolm. The novel dedicates space to the relations

Arts & Life • Reads The viral book ‘A Little Life’ handles little with care In her column “Brutal Monsters,” Cate Burtner ’25 offers commentary on the literature of mental illness. (Graphic: DA-HEE KIM/The Stanford Daily) By Cate Burtner Multimedia by Da-Hee Kim Oct. 28, 2024, 11:07 p.m. In her column “Brutal Monsters,” Cate Burtner ’25 offers commentary on the literature of mental illness. Content warning: mentions of abuse and self-harm (SH). Hanya Yanagihara’s book “A Little Life” came out in 2015. In 2023, it took the internet by storm. In July 2023, a friend told me that everyone who read

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