A Little Life || Rant Review [CC]

These are my thoughts on this book. Don't come for me 👀🙈

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⚡️ Content Warnings: ableism, chronic pain, homophobia, fatphobia, grief, death, self-harm, car injury, intense self loathing, paedophilia, sexual + physical + emotional child abuse, anxiety, drug addiction, physically and emotionally abusive relationship, rape, divorce, seizures, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempt, PTSD, surgery, car crash, eating disorder, depression

--- #booktube #rantreview #bookreview

As always, closed captions (subtitles) available x

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Hi! I’m Olivia-Savannah. I’m a British student studying English Literature and Creative Writing in the UK. I also spend a lot of time in the Netherlands where some of my family live. I love reading, writing, yoga, cooking and baking. I love reading all genres and age audiences. Nice to meet you x

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[OliviasCatastrophe]

When I say Jude needs an 'ace relationship' I mean and should have said Jude needs a sexless relationship! Thank you to Daniela for correcting me (if you want an explanation as to why saying 'ace relationship' is wrong her explanation is in the comment from the user Only If For A Page.) I apologise if I made anyone uncomfortable with what I said and always appreciate corrections of any of my language and/or actions.

[kiki-qmlk]

feels like she made a list of triggers and just built a story around it... great review

[SanctimoniousLion]

Oh thank God I'm not the only one feeling this way. I hated it so much because Jude doesn't seem to have a personality except the trauma and disability which is like: you do realize disabled and traumatized people have more to them than solely being disabled and traumatized, do you? Jude just seemed like a vessel for whatever Yanagihara was trying to say. ✅

[gabrielle]

I feel so relieved to have found this video because I feel lots of readers really praise this book, but I felt so icky and unsettled after reading it. The last five minutes of this video are incredibly important. This review made me tear up way more than a Little Life ever did.

[sarahmclendon]

After I finished the book, I saw an interview with the author and she stated that she wanted to create a story where the main character never gets better. That really rubbed me the wrong way because Jude does get better. He was learning to open up to people, to be intimate, to take better care of himself. He stilled battled with his demons, still harmed himself, but for him he was getting better. It was like Hanya Yanagihara thinks someone can only be better if they are 100% healthy and that’s not the case. I believe he would have kept getting better had she not sabotaged the story by taking the one person he cared about the most away.

[MusiacterJoe]

As a bisexual man with cerebral palsy that has had some traumatic experiences in the past (way less severe than Jude’s of course) I started this book thinking I’d find some relatable representation. Then I went on and the story kept feeling more and more insincere, , exploitative. Like it wasn’t at all interested in showing the actual process of overcoming trauma and reconnecting with oneself.
So: I got curious and searched for author interviews to understand what her goal was and when she answered all questions with answers like: “I didn’t do any research on mental health, the idea was to create a character that never gets better” and I instantly thought: wow! She seems so reckless it scares me a bit.

[firstactionhero]

I really appreciate you stating that you disagree with the notion that there is a level of trauma nobody can pull you back from. Too many people use their "trauma" as a weapon to bully people. People who really have trauma don't want to have it. They don't bask in it to obtain special treatment. Even the worst trauma is recoverable. Whoever reads this, know there is help for you if you have trauma you desperately want help from. There are solutions.

[dodgyyoutuber]

A better books about how childhood sexual trauma can follow a man while giving that man AGENCY and having a bitter sweet but hopeful ending is the Kite Runner.

[siggy]

something I don’t like abt this book is that Malcolm and JB are given excruciatingly long and intense backstories in the intro to the characters - they’re meant to be the MAIN characters but then 1/3 of the way through they’re even less important to jude’s life (aka the plot) than other side characters like Richard or Harold - who are not given big ass backstories so it adds to my frustration especially considering how long the book is.

[lotoloto]

As someone who suffered from abuse at a very young age and has self harm and other body image problems I don't think the representation of how characters react those topics is necessarily what makes the book wrong (of course, these are very touchy topics so everyone is entitled to their own opinion), I didn't find any problems with the amount of pain Jude went through in his past life, sure, it's a lot, but for my experience sometimes life can be a series of unlucky events BUT everything stopped being a legit representation of a shitty life and delved into trauma porn as soon as Willem died, that moment flipped the whole book narrative to me and made me realise that the author just wanted to fetishise pain itself and was not interested in representing actual characters and their stories anymore. Reading interviews to the author, yeah, she just wanted to write a sad story to voyeuristicly entratain herself appropriating the sometimes true experiences of people just to fuel her eroticism for trauma, and that's disgusting.

[KierTheScrivener]

As someone with an invisible disability whose pain was passed over time and time and time again until I physically could not go on and to be three years later without the barest of accommodations or financial stability I grieved the life I thought I would have, but I have long stopped feeling any frustration outside of the hoops that I can't jump to prove I am worthy of respect, value and accomodation.

Having a disability is hard but the way people treat and ignore the needs of disabled people is far harder (in many cases). And that is not the story we are told.

[anythingelseplss]

Thank you so much. I was discharged from the military as to being disabled from PTSD. Time over time I was called broken and at times I was thinking it but the author wrote this book as if this characters destiney was to commit suicide. He was disabled mentally as well and that's something that disabled people can thrive off of. I was sexually assaulted too many times to count and forced by serious relationships that I was in that I got numb to it. I guess like the book. The difference is, where is the light at the end of the tunnel? There is one. I am not living anymore...I'm thriving and could'nt imagine being in a happier mental state🥰 I've learned to accept and appreciate my emotions and triggers and to call my brain down. It took time but I WANTED help and I feel like many people struggling want help too. I wish the author painted us in a better picture because this makes us sound "weak and broken" but we may be the strongest.

[jaimeeliza]

i finished this book about 30 mins ago after pushing through for 2 months. TERRIBLE. and as someone who is chronically disabled i felt just floored. what was the message? my life has no meaning, i should be sad all the time and to end it?

[emmagnolia]

[spoilers] I don’t even think I needed a happy ending, just some HAPPINESS. Jeez Louise I knew as soon as it was proposed that Willem felt feelings for Jude, that yanagihara was going to ruin it and that’s when I mentally checked out of the book. Had he and willem actually found true happiness together, had he healed enough to enjoy willems company, or start to believe that willem really loved him and he was worthy of it, or had willem ACTUALLY been patient with Jude and gone all in like Andy said, and then something tragic happened at the end, it would’ve broken my heart ten times more. By the time their relationship started to develop I knew the book would end the way it did with some lazy excuses as to why it would never really be a good relationship and Jude would end his life. If I had finally gotten to not a state of perfection with Jude, but to a place of contentment, and then she wanted to break our hearts with his death or willems death, I’d say okay fair. But like you said, the way she drug his trauma and pain along so statically, just made me feel nothing. I’ve struggled with trauma, self harm and suicidal behavior/actions. I see why people relate to Jude. But in my opinion, if I wanted to use my experience to break peoples hearts the way the author used Jude’s to try and break ours, you have to include the moments of contentment. The times I have felt most brutally sad were not when I was at my lowest, but when I had finally reached contentment and realized how much there was to lose. Jude never gets there truly. You never get to a point where you feel that contentment with him and think “oh god, if the author rips this away from us, it’s going to hurt so bad.” You only ever know despair, Jude believes he will never know happiness and Hanya yanagihara makes it so, instead of actually trying to challenge that. He doesn’t have to become a neurotypical person by the end of the book, or become magically healed of all his issues. But the fact that there is no growth, NO healing from the time he’s a teenager to the time he dies is such a cop out to me. If you’re gonna write about the complexities of mental illness, write it in a complex way. I think the book was lazy at best and exploitative at worst.

[Himynameismai]

I already didn’t want to read this book because it sounded like “pain porn” and just straight up emotional manipulation, but to know that is about a disabled person and the author thinks it’s okay to not have done any research on it actually made me angry.

Wtf book tube?

[sleeppparalysis]

Finally, an actual good honest review of this book. I just finished reading this book today and I couldn’t put words to my feelings because I feel like I felt nothing throughout the whole book and didn’t shed a single tear reading it, just angst and anger like you do while I see every other reviews of people reading, crying, sobbing over this book and it got me questioning myself like Do I not have emotions anymore? Is there something wrong with me? Why am I not feeling anything? which is weird because I’ve cried over other sad books before and I was expecting this book to hit me the hardest, but it didn’t And I couldn’t put into words why but I think I get it now after watching your video. The points you made are so valid and well done and the way you explained it made so much sense, probably made even more sense than the whole book. Thank you for doing a review that gives a different perspective, an eye-opening one, compared to all the other reviews.

[eegk]

I'm so glad to see somebody talk about the unfavorable parts of this book. The fact that the book's premise is that some people are too broken to be fixed while the book is also about a disabled man is so disheartening, I hate that a book this stereotyped and harmful has gained as much traction among non-disabled audiences as it has. The bit where you talked about JB being fixable because he is able-bodied whereas Jude is too far gone because he is disabled was a comparison I haven't seen other people make, but I'm glad you said it. I had a similar realization where I was unable to really resonate with Jude's trauma or to feel sad or upset for him because I had found that his childhood and backstory were so unbelievable it felt almost like a mockery, or a show– and after finishing the book and thinking about it for a few days, I can only come up with more and more things I found unsatisfactory or problematic. Thank you for the CC on this video, I enjoyed listening to your thoughts :]

[misstambourinegirl]

As a disabled woman, thank you for making this video. I'm totally subscribing

[chrisdanielsson]

This is such a powerful review! My heart broke for you at the end. I hope it was cathartic for you in some way, so you can shake it off sooner rather than later.
Also, Im so tired of this glorification of everything dark and miserable. As if it is somehow more true to the human experience just because it leaves you hopeless - as if that is not just as overly simplified and predictable as everything being all sunshine and rainbows - and much more depressing. I cant fathom ever writing something with the sole intention of making people unhappy or wanting to communicate that some people are beyond hope. No one is beyond hope, ever. Thats what hope is.

[Pixiewithpens]

ok im sorry just one more thing: this book + the curious incident seem to point toward a trend where writing disabled characters without doing research is highly rewarded, which i HATE! its not only bad in content but its also bad writing, bad work, they did a bad job and i have a feeling - as usual, could be wrong - that writing without research on any other topic does not win the book any awards