Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara (born September 20, 1974) is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer.

Quotes

A Little Life (2015 novel)

You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: 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.

...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.

Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?

there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.

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

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.

He had looked at [him], then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of [him] and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it.

Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere…If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.

He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.

It saddened him, of course, that his sex life and his home life should have to be two distinct realms, but he was old enough now to know that within every relationship was something unfulfilled and disappointing, something that had to be sought elsewhere.

[L]ife compensated for its losses, and he would realize the truth of that, although sometimes it would seem like life had not just compensated for itself but had done so extravagantly, as if his very life was begging him to forgive it, as if it were piling riches upon him, smothering him in all things beautiful and wonderful and hoped-for so he wouldn't resent it, so he would allow it to keep moving forward.

They all...sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.

Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.

The People in the Trees (2013 novel)

Sometimes I would have to take my glasses off simply so the world would smudge and recede for a moment and cease to seem so relentlessly present tense.

Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.

Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.

I found myself thinking that perhaps there was something inexorable about the way events unfolded, as if my life--which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling--was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.

It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one's colleagues.

To be a scientist is to learn to live all one's life with questions that will never be answered, with the knowledge that one was too early or too late, with the anguish of not having been able to guess at the solution that, once presented, seems so obvious that one can only curse oneself for not seeing what one ought to have, if only one had looked in a slightly different direction.

But time, I have come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs. We speak of managing time, but it is the opposite. Our lives are filled with businesses because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.

from interviews/conversations

no matter how bleak a society is or how totalitarian a regime is or a person's circumstances, one of the things that we all want as humans is affection and love and to find some beauty in our lives. (NPR, 2022)

in all of my books, you see disease and people grappling with disease. But disease itself is something that always has a name. It's something that characters learn to face forthrightly. And it's something that they eventually learn to live with. And those were very good lessons, not just for the writing of this book, but for living in our current moment. (NPR, 2022)

…I know plenty of people who have been at the helm of various creative galleries, or production companies, and have never felt the need to behave poorly. It’s just a lazy justification. And as someone who has managed to go 25 years without conflating sex with power, or bullying my colleagues, I find it particularly offensive.
- On the false idea that bad behavior by management leads to better creative outputs in “Hanya Yanagihara: influential magazine editor by day, best-selling author by night” in The Guardian (2018 Apr 22)

Part of this book is an homage to the way my friends and I live: lives without children, without marriage, lives you rarely see depicted in popular art, unless as a punch line or a tragedy, lives not considered by many to be full, legitimate adulthood. And yet when I was growing up, my parents always had a diversity of friends, some of whom lived different kinds of lives themselves…And they had many friends who had chosen this other path of adulthood, who weren’t married, who didn’t have children, whose lives didn’t resemble their own. So this sort of life never seemed like anything less-than to me. The loneliness of living the life I do comes from the fact that so many people do think it’s a lesser existence, a purgatory of true adulthood.
- On depicting adulthood in A Little Life in “An Interview with Hanya Yanagihara” in Believer Magazine (2017 Nov 20)

I admire authors whose every novel answers a single question or theme, but who do so in wildly different ways. (with Women’s Prize)

The first friend we choose is our first announcement to the world of selfhood: This is my person, this is what it says about me. (with Women’s Prize)

I hate it when writers are timid. And I don’t mean that there needs to be an excess of any sort of emotion. But I think you can tell when a writer is being conservative because that’s who they are as a person and when they’re being conservative because they don’t want to offend sensibilities…I’d rather have something that’s messy and fails, but fails spectacularly, than something polite. (The Spinoff, 2016)

In some ways. I do want to do something very different with each book…I think this book is linked to the first but approaches it in a completely different way. The first book was much chillier, more remote. And intentionally so. I don’t think it was a book that anyone loved and I didn’t love it either. It was not a book that was meant to inspire love in the way that I think this one is.
- On how she compares her works The People in the Trees and A Little Life in “Hanya Yanagihara: ‘I wanted everything turned up a little too high’” in The Guardian (2015 Jul 26)

One of the things my editor and I did fight about…is the idea of how much a reader can take. To me you get nowhere second guessing how much can a reader stand and how much can she not. What a reader can always tell is when you are holding back for fear of offending them. I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high…
- On debating the reactions of her readership in “Hanya Yanagihara: ‘I wanted everything turned up a little too high’” in The Guardian (2015 Jul 26)

It’s so easy to affix a one-word description to someone, and it’s so easy for that description to change: if we call someone a genius, and then they become a monster, are they still a genius? How do we assess someone’s greatness: is it what they contribute to society, and is that contribution negated if they also inflict horrible pain on another? Or—as I have often wondered—is it not so binary? (Vogue, 2013)

[about The People in the Trees] One of the things I wanted to do with this novel was write a compressed history of Hawaii, where I’m from, and the effects of colonization there. I don’t want to be reductive here and say that all Westernization is always bad in all ways. But I think there are patterns of the aftermath of colonization that you see echoed in cultures and communities across the world. What happens on Ivu’ivu in my novel is a much more grotesque, extreme version of what some might say happened on Hawaii. (Vogue, 2013)

with National Book Foundation

[about choosing A Little Life as the title] We have such small lives, all of us. And this is the story of one of those lives.

Often, we’re drawn most powerfully to people who we know have the capacity to harm us.

My hope was always that the experience of reading this book would mirror my experience of writing it: I wanted it to feel like quicksand, like entering a landscape that literally swallows you and then spits you up somewhere else.

Part of what gives relationships their charge is the sense that they are breakable, that within each one is the possibility of a fissure. (This is true of every relationship between humans: One of the greatest socially sustaining fictions we’ve created is the idea that a parent’s love for a child is inviolable.)

Friendship is ultimately revelatory because of, not despite, its limitations. One person can’t save another. But to be a member of a real friendship means that you recognize that…and try anyway. It’s the realization that what you’re doing may not resolve anything—but that lack of resolution doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

I wanted to remove every external event from this book: once you remove historical landmarks from a narrative, you force the reader into a sort of walled space, one in which they have no choice but to focus entirely on the interior lives of these characters. There’s no distraction and no respite and no tether, either: I wanted the world of this book to feel by turns intimate and oppressive—and utterly inescapable.

External links

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an article about:

Hanya Yanagihara

Commons

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Hanya Yanagihara