A Little Life was an enveloping experience as a reader, affecting and emotionally raw from the first few pages. Yanagihara’s lush writing and deeply felt characters drew me in, and the raw emotion that courses through every sentence of the novel made me fully invested in Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm’s lives.

Of all the characters, it was most painful to read about Jude’s life, but it was also the most evocative. I had visceral responses to Yanagihara’s descriptions of his suffering over trauma and self-worth, and I remained especially affected by the book for days afterwards. It was painful and horrible watching Jude struggle to embrace a life that made sense to him in the face of everything he had been through, but it was also wildly, profoundly inspiring.

What’s more, the depiction of friendship and solidarity it offered made it an intense human experience for me too. The compassion, caring and devotion of Jude and his friends was so passionate and vivid that I felt I was going through their lives with them. It was a literary work that saluted the value of friendship, of not turning away from anyone, and this touched me.

But let me be clear, ‘A Little Life’ is no light read. Of course, much of what it depicts is the darkness of the human condition: the very worst one can imagine from trauma and abuse to addiction and self-destruction, even internal hemorrhaging. At times, I had to put the book down because a character’s pain made me too upset to continue. But along with the undesirable came plenty of the desirable: moments of exquisite beauty, even amid the bleakness, that provided breaks in the dark.

Although it was tough to read – tough in a way that left me feeling changed and reshaped in my thinking about the world – I walked away from A Little Life profoundly grateful to Yanagihara for her storytelling, and heartbroken.