Hanya Yanagihara wears her black hair pulled back with a razor-sharp center part, and she prefers to dress in black, especially in clothes by Dries Van Noten, the cerebral Belgian designer. She is the editor-in-chief of T, the style supplement to the Times, which publishes articles and photo-essays about fashion, travel, art, and design. Through her editorial work, Yanagihara, who is forty-seven, has become conversant with hundreds of creative people and their work. She has spent a lot of time travelling and has an unusually international aesthetic: she is as comfortable speaking about ceramicists in Sendai as about conceptual artists in New York. She took over T four years ago, and, thanks to her magpie intelligence, it has become a vibrant cabinet of curiosities. Fashion and design spreads are now steeped in art history, and the magazine publishes essays that are surprising, and sometimes esoteric: an analysis of avant-garde flower arrangers; a rigorous survey of artists, from Japan to South Africa, who are “reimagining the animal figurine.”
Yanagihara’s private life is as constrained as her cultural knowledge is broad. She lives in a narrow SoHo loft, decorated with art and antiques and baubles, that she calls her “pod.” She rarely goes out and likes her place to be tidy—she won’t host dinner parties because she doesn’t “want the crumbs.” We once agreed to meet at a local restaurant. “You either go to Omen, Raoul’s, or Fanelli’s if you live down here, and I go to Omen,” she declared, adding that she wanted to sit at a particular table in the back. When she takes her trips, she packs a suitcase that, a friend says, is “almost as small as the one in ‘Rear Window.’ ”
Yanagihara is also a novelist with a large readership. Her 2015 book, “A Little Life,” begins as the story of the friendships among four recent college graduates, then cascades into an operatic, often appalling, chronicle of the abuse suffered by one of the protagonists. Like her magazine, the novel is proudly baroque. The critical reception to the book was very divided: it was called a “great gay novel” by one critic, and a “ghastly litany” by another. But it has sold more than a million and a half copies in English alone. It’s still easy to find readers talking online, with odd pleasure, about the emotional devastation that reading “A Little Life” brought upon them. TikTokers post videos of themselves crying after finishing the book.
Yanagihara is more confident talking about her magazine editing than about her novelistic abilities. She writes at night, for long stretches when the words are flowing. She completed her new novel, “To Paradise”—which stages three radically different narratives, set in three centuries, at the same town house in Washington Square—during the pandemic. Like “A Little Life,” it exceeds seven hundred pages. After she has hit on a plot and a structure she sticks to them, as if revising risks collapse. As she put it, “Once I’ve poured the concrete, I don’t rebuild the foundation.” Despite the extraordinary success of her fiction career, she regards it as a “slightly shameful” sideline. Indeed, she knows almost no other novelists, because she isn’t comfortable among them. She said, “I find that, whether from a sort of evil-eye avoidance superstition, or from not feeling that I quite have the right to call myself a writer—I don’t know what this is about, really, but I feel that writer is not something that I am, it is something that I do. And it’s something that I do in private.”
The most reliable route to becoming a novelist is that of the outsider, and this was Yanagihara’s path. She was born in 1974 in Los Angeles and spent her early childhood in Honolulu, the daughter of a doctor who did research on mouse immunology for the National Institutes of Health and a mother who practiced needlework, quilting, and other crafts. She remembers growing up with her brother in a house full of curated things that they weren’t allowed to touch. Her father, a third-generation Hawaiian resident, was of Japanese descent; her mother is Korean American. Her parents have always been deeply in love; Yanagihara described their relationship as “very much a union of two.” She suffered from severe asthma, which a doctor treated with steroids. When she was around ten, her father, apparently having determined that she was old enough to confront hard truths, warned her that the powerful drugs would devastate her body: “ ‘Do you know what happens with prednisone for a long period? You start growing hair all over your body, and your back begins to hunch, and you go blind before you know it.’ ” Yanagihara told me, “I remember I was crying and crying.” She began thinking of herself as “basically a big pair of lungs.”
Being a “sickly child,” as she says, was traumatizing, giving her the unshakable feeling of being different from her peers. Her family moved often, and in the mid-eighties the Yanagiharas arrived in Tyler, a small city in eastern Texas, where Hanya’s father practiced and taught medicine. Hawaii was full of Asian Americans, but Tyler was not, and Hanya experienced racism for the first time. When she walked down the hall at school, she remembers, students lined up, chanting, “Ching-chong-duck-dong.”
Her father, from whom she gets both her collecting instinct and a quality of emotional disengagement, became aware of her distress but considered it overblown. She remembers that once, when she and her brother misbehaved, he punished them by locking them out of the house. It would do them good, he reasoned, to face the kids who’d been menacing them. On another occasion, Hanya’s father took her for a haircut; when a barber told an anti-Asian joke, she looked to her father to respond, but he shrugged it off. “I wasn’t angry at the hairdresser,” she told me. “I was angry at my father, and I was angry at myself, as if we had done something by our existence that had, if not warranted the comment, inspired it.” She said that it was her first experience with the complexity of shame—of how you can cause “some sort of rupture, ripples in the social system, by your presence.” Around this time, her father gave her a copy of V. S. Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill,” a short story of post-colonial anger set in England. “He said it would help teach me rage,” she remembered.
Yanagihara moved back to Hawaii for her final three years of high school, living first with her grandparents and then with a teacher. She enrolled at Smith College in 1992. Explaining her choice, she joked, “In the early nineties, it was very easy to get into the women’s colleges,” then added, “Being a female was never something—and continues not to really be something—that was interesting to me. . . . So it was odd that I ended up at a women’s college.” At Smith, she marched for Asian American rights, and when writing papers she spelled “women” as “womyn”—a stance that she now regards as mostly a pose. “I should have spent more time thinking critically, and not trying to scare my way into easy ‘A’s,” she said. Yanagihara slept with women at Smith—“everyone had sex with women.” When the dorm next door hosted an annual orgy she didn’t go, because if she had she would have had to help with the cleanup afterward. By the time she got to college, she knew that she wanted to be a writer. “I was really going because I was hoping I would be like Sylvia Plath and stick my head in an oven,” she joked. “But I had pretensions to be something literary.”
After college, she moved to Manhattan, where she worked in the sales department of a paperback publisher. She later became a publicist, then an assistant editor at Riverhead, a hardcover imprint. Friends who visited her when she was in her late twenties were surprised to find gallery-worthy objects in her small, sixth-floor apartment. She made her first major purchase, “Bass Strait, Table Cape,” a photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto, for ten thousand dollars, paying in installments. Her parents, she said, “had always instilled in me that art collecting was just something I should do,” though in practice she gathered objects “only to amuse myself.” She told me that she often found the outside world forbidding, and so she made her private world a refuge.
Yanagihara came to feel that she wasn’t destined to be a successful book editor. At the time, she said, “you had to have a certain kind of polish as a person, if you were a woman. Either that, or you had to be a spectacular weirdo who was rich. And I was neither of those things.” She added, “I was socially awkward. I didn’t really know how to behave in an office.”
Still, like a good collector, she pieced together a comfortable New York family. She gave her closest friends pet names—she still refers to two of them as Bunny and Giggles. Members of her circle found her a good listener but a poor confider. One friend, Seth Mnookin, a journalist, said that he had detailed his romantic life to Yanagihara over the years, and had asked her on occasion whether she was seeing anyone. She always evaded the question: “She sort of plays it off, in a way that is simultaneously disarming and makes it really clear that that door is closed.” (Yanagihara told me that for a long time she has been romantically interested only in men, but hasn’t found lasting companionship. She also said, “The understanding of who I was as a sexual creature was never great, or of that much interest.”)
She also didn’t tell her friends about a novel that she had begun writing soon after graduating from Smith. It was based on the life of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who did pathbreaking research in the South Pacific on infectious disease, then was imprisoned, in 1997, after pleading guilty to sexually abusing one of the dozens of children he had adopted from that region. The story was complicated, involving a lot of research, and she wasn’t sure that she had the skills to write it. There were years when she barely touched her manuscript, but she never gave it up. “The book became a sort of metaphor for delayed adulthood,” she told me. “I felt like I’d made this foolish bargain as a twenty-year-old. It wasn’t something I was ever going to get past.” She took editing jobs at various magazines, including Condé Nast Traveler. At last, when she had been working on her manuscript for almost fifteen years, she mentioned it to her best friend, Bunny—Jared Hohlt, another magazine editor. Yanagihara recalled, “Becoming accountable to Jared made me finally finish it.”
“The People in the Trees,” as she titled the book, was a political and moral novel. She wanted to interrogate “the binarian proposition” that people are either good or evil, and to square “a person who did and discovered extraordinary things with a person who caused great pain and was deeply flawed.” In the book, which fictionalizes elements of Gajdusek’s life and research, a scientist named Norton Perina learns that the members of a Micronesian tribe eat a food that dramatically extends life but doesn’t prevent mental decay. Once Perina announces his discovery, missionaries and pharmaceutical representatives descend on the tribe, ultimately destroying it. Like these predatory companies, Perina commits shameful acts but feels no shame.
Gajdusek’s story interested her, Yanagihara says, for its colonial overtones, and she was fascinated by how some scientists justified work that had destructive effects. Yanagihara wrapped her story in a postmodern package, creating a Nabokovian narrator—a colleague of Perina’s—who doesn’t understand the evil that he is abetting. Although “The People in the Trees” got favorable reviews, it gives Yanagihara little pleasure now. “It’s a cold book,” she said. “There are very good cool books, but it’s artificially cold.”
When I visited Yanagihara’s overstuffed loft, she told me that if there wasn’t something vulgar in a house the décor was a failure. A bathroom shelf held a collection of gaudy red toy robots from postwar Japan—tin mementos, she said, of the country’s “nuclear anxiety.” The apartment walls, one of which she’d painted what she called a “dusty Ingres blue,” were covered with framed photographs, and most of the surfaces held tchotchkes that she had carried home in her tiny suitcase after trips abroad. On the dining-room table was a Shōwa-era sculpture of a penis and testicles which, at first glance, looks like a camel. “It’s a walking penis,” she commented. “He’s erect and on the go!” She uses the base of the sculpture as a ring caddy. The lights were low: “I like feeling when I come in here that the rest of the world has vanished.” On one wall is a Diane Arbus photograph of a contortionist standing in a room lit by a dangling bulb. “The bottom half of his body is turned around,” she pointed out, adding that the image had helped inspire “A Little Life.” Other isolated faces looked out from gelatin prints.
The living room was split by an enormous double-sided bookcase with some ten thousand books on it. Yanagihara pointed out some early-American furniture that her father, who is now seventy-six, had given her. (Her parents currently live in Hawaii.) One was a tester bed from the eighteen-tens: she slept in it as a child, and still does. Another was a Philadelphia Chippendale chair. Both items were out of fashion, and therefore worth nothing, she said, but that’s not why they mattered to her. “I was allowed to sit in the chair once a year, for a photo,” she recalled. “Until I got to be a teen-ager, and then I wasn’t allowed to sit in the chair anymore.” She paused. “But now the chair’s mine.”
She made green tea, and we sat in the shadow of the bookcase and talked about her job at T. She had taken it soon after “A Little Life” became a best-seller, and, given her success as a writer, I asked her why she’d done so. Her first explanation was that she’d needed health insurance: she has medical issues that have been exacerbated by her childhood reliance on steroids, and often feels sick. When we met, she’d just spent a week alone nursing a bad cold, sometimes chatting on the phone with Bunny or Giggles (Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, who lives in Paris). She hadn’t minded the isolation, but understands that socializing has its purpose. “Sometimes you have to fight to keep yourself engaged with other humans,” she said. “You have to stay in practice of being around other people.”
The main reason that she was at T, though, was that she loved being an editor. Even from the remove of her SoHo pod, she can detect emerging cultural patterns—and identify old aesthetics that are reëmerging. One era that particularly attracts her is New York at the dawn of the aids crisis. In 2018, she devoted an issue of T to the subject. “This period between 1981 and 1983 was just fantastically rich,” she said. She began listing a dizzying number of Reagan-era novelties, from Jeff Koons to the sun-dried tomato: “You had people on Broadway like Glenn Close at the same time that it was probably the last era of great underground theatre, like La Mama.” The magazine, which included speculative renderings of how some creative figures would look today had they not died of aids, drew mixed responses. Some felt that she had aestheticized a time of pain. Christopher Niquet, a fashion editor and writer who knows some of the friends and family of the deceased, told me that, “as a whole, the issue was odd.” He felt that the takeaway of the photo-essay was “We hope that if you were still alive you would still look young, slim, and stylish, so we could profile you in our pages.”
Yanagihara felt lucky to be running T, a publication that nobody interfered with as long as it made money and gave advertisers fashion credits. She thought of her version as “a very well-photographed kind of zine.” Part of what kept her secure at the Times was her identity. “Let me put it this way,” she said, carefully. “I think they’re pleased I’m a nonwhite woman.” She felt that, through T, she had found a wormhole to a front-row seat in the fashion world, which ruthlessly excludes the undesirable. “I know I’m not attractive,” she said. “I would like to be. But we can’t all be.” She paused. “Obviously, such things don’t matter at the Times. No disrespect to my colleagues!”
Amonth before the publication of “The People in the Trees,” in 2013, Yanagihara presented her editor with a new manuscript, nearly a thousand pages long. She had spent eighteen months feverishly writing—every evening from nine until midnight and through the weekends. If the process of writing “The People in the Trees” was trench warfare, “A Little Life” was a blitzkrieg. Instead of sculpting dexterous sentences, she went for overwhelming emotional effect. She wanted it to be a little vulgar. “It was the book that I’d probably been trying all my life not to write,” she said. “It was the easiest writing I ever did—it felt almost preordained, like it already existed, and I was just transcribing.”
“A Little Life” initially seems like an all-male version of Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” chronicling the postgraduate experiences of four college friends: an actor, a litigator, an artist, and an architect. Two are gay, one is bisexual, and one is straight. One is white, one is black, one is of mixed race, and the ethnicity of one is unspecified. Yanagihara did not have her own circle of college friends, and she took some of her inspiration from Hohlt’s. But there were echoes of her adult life, with its constructed Manhattan family. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” one character wonders. “Why wasn’t it even better?” After about a hundred pages, the story veers into the hidden past of the litigator, Jude St. Francis, who was raised in a monastery where he was repeatedly raped by the Brothers who ran it. A series of increasingly lurid disclosures follow, helping the pages fly by—the novelist Michael Cunningham told me that the book has “all the satisfactions of pulp literature and all the satisfactions of literature-literature”—but the narrative also risks growing intolerable. Yanagihara told Kirkus that, when constructing Jude’s story, she had in mind “this picture of a very light blue that shaded to a very dark indigo.”
At eight, Jude flees his foster home with a seemingly sympathetic Brother, who quickly forces him into prostitution. (At one point, the Brother monstrously insists that, when Jude is turning tricks, he show “a little life.”) Eventually, Jude escapes to a gas station, where he is picked up by a sadistic psychiatrist, taken to a locked room, and raped repeatedly. This section transfixed Yanagihara to the point that she kept writing it while waiting for a flight at an airport in Haneda, Japan. “I stayed up all night,” she told me. “I couldn’t stop.” She explained that the feeling wasn’t “pleasurable, but it felt inevitable.”
These brutalities are told in flashback, but the relief that Jude’s present life seems to promise doesn’t last. “I don’t think happiness is for me,” he says, though his friends tenderly insist otherwise. He begins to date a man—who rapes and beats him. “Every year, his right to humanness diminished,” Jude reflects about himself. Turning his shame inward, he engages in self-mutilation. Many writers would only allude to such episodes, but Yanagihara narrates them extensively. By book’s close, we have read countless times about Jude cutting himself. Eventually, he meets his inevitable end.
Yanagihara told me that she wanted the story to feel like a relentless piling on. And she pointed out that, though “A Little Life” may seem unconstrained, it has a precise structure. Each of its seven chapters contains three sections, each subsection of which totals eighteen thousand words. This scaffolding was there to organize, but not dilute, the story’s corrosive emotions. She did not separate the subsections with white space, “to deprive readers of natural resting places.”
Upon publication, in 2015, the book confounded some reviewers. One denounced it as “torture porn,” and Janet Maslin, in the Times, called it “a potboiler,” adding, “You are invited to press your nose to that glass and wait for Jude’s awful history to destroy him.” Yanagihara, though, was convinced that she’d needed to shout to make a point, given the “technological age’s tendency to remove ourselves from our own lives.” Some other writers and critics clearly agreed. “A Little Life” was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, and since then it has become a treasured text. In 2020, a Spanish blogger named Cintia Fernández Ruiz wrote on her Web page, “When I think about Jude, I cry again. He goes beyond being a character and becomes a real person who I want to hug, and console.” To an almost dismaying degree, many readers saw in Jude’s abject powerlessness a reflection of their own lives. Another blogger, Scott Manley Hadley, posted more recently that the novel had “repeatedly left me grasping my chest as I hyperventilated through tears as I read and walked on my way to my dull job in this dull eternal half-world” of the pandemic, adding, “I cared more about Jude St. Francis and Willem Ragnarsson over the past couple of weeks than I cared about anyone or anything else.” Such intense feelings have sometimes been projected onto Yanagihara. Once, when she was giving a reading in Europe, an onlooker grabbed her and pulled up her sleeve, to check her wrists. “I just had to,” she said. When an interviewer asked Yanagihara if she was abused, she declined to answer. (She explained to me, “I don’t think that is material to anything—not the writing of ‘A Little Life,’ and not how people read it.”)
The novel also inspired a conversation about the gay experience and how it was portrayed in American fiction. Yanagihara told me that she wasn’t even sure that Jude and Willem, the actor, who become involved toward the end of the book, would see themselves as gay, but that hadn’t stopped the novelist Garth Greenwell from declaring, in The Atlantic, that “A Little Life” was “an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America.” For Greenwell, the book’s over-the-top storytelling connected it to a quintessentially gay predilection for “melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera.” His imprimatur helped grant legitimacy to Yanagihara’s fiction, but the review elicited a rebuttal from another gay writer, Daniel Mendelsohn. Whereas Greenwell felt that the novel pushed against the bland “homonormativity” of modern gay life, Mendelsohn found it retrograde. Yanagihara, he said, had resuscitated “a pre-Stonewall plot type in which gay characters are desexed, miserable, and eventually punished for finding happiness.” Worse, she wrote poorly.
One evening, I delicately brought up Mendelsohn’s essay. When Yanagihara flinched, I remembered she had told me that she didn’t read reviews. “I don’t think much of Daniel Mendelsohn,” she said sharply, after a pause. “I hate his writing.” She added, though, that she also didn’t think she was a reliable interpreter of gay-male life: “I got this invitation, in maybe 2018, from the Oxford Union, asking if I wanted to debate against the idea that a non-gay person should not be representing queer life—but I happen to agree.”
As a conversationalist, Yanagihara was poised and intimidating—she told me that “all deep and loving relationships have an element of fear”—but also charismatic and funny, with a Wildean contrarian sensibility. “In New York, it’s easy to be friends with someone when times are bad,” she aphorized. “The harder thing is to be friends with them when times are good—when they’re on the upswing. Because one of the lifebloods of the city is a low-key hum of professional jealousy.” She seemed to enjoy frustrating attempts to pierce her privacy. At the same time, she said that she hated it when people who gave interviews described themselves as “private.” She preferred “withholding,” “furtive,” “squirrelly.” She disdained the way contemporary public figures feigned not just shyness but also politeness. Gore Vidal, she declared, was a kind of celebrity she admired: “selfish and unapologetic and a creature of appetites.”
Yanagihara said that she’d once been in therapy but found it useless: she had come with a concrete question, not a request for an intrusive mental workup. “I wanted advice,” she told me. “And they mostly refused to give it.” A romantic friendship was in a difficult spot, and she wanted “instructions for how to fall out of love.”
She is often willing to say things that most people won’t. She told me that she was unashamed to be ambitious: “I’m pretty single-minded, and I stick in there longer than everyone else.” She connected this tenacity to her youthful humiliations. “The more personal autonomy or agency or identity—all of which are linked—have been taken from you, the harder you work to reassert it.”
Her colleagues at T confirmed her self-assessment. Some adore her fast mind and certainty. Pico Iyer, who has written many articles for her, told me that she seemed to know more about Japan—a country that he has visited steadily for more than three decades—than he did. Ligaya Mishan, a culture writer who contributes frequently to T, said that Yanagihara “always finds the deeper thought,” adding, “You might think a piece is finished, and then she asks for more—‘more thinking on the page’—and she’s right.” Others had complaints. One person who has worked with the magazine told me that trying to persuade her that she was wrong about something she wanted in the magazine was as hopeless as rooting for Jude in “A Little Life”—eventually, Yanagihara ground you down. Some colleagues said that she is a reluctant delegator and unconcerned with morale. One summarized Yanagihara’s ethic as “I don’t complain—you don’t complain.”
The breakaway success of “A Little Life,” which was published by Doubleday, buttressed Yanagihara’s tendency to trust her instincts. Both Hohlt and her editor, Gerry Howard, on seeing the manuscript, had urged her to cut back on the melodrama and the violence. Yanagihara largely refused, convinced that Jude’s story required excess. She also had an unusual level of input during the publishing process, rejecting Doubleday’s cover concepts and insisting instead on a photograph by Peter Hujar of a handsome man apparently in great pain. (In fact, he is having an orgasm.) “Gerry and I had numerous fights about it,” she said, including a lunch “where we were really yelling at each other.” Recalling the “bits of scrambled egg” that flew out of his mouth, she added, “I really enjoy fighting with Gerry.” The cover has become one of the best known of this era.
“The People in the Trees,” for which Yanagihara received a hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-dollar advance, had not sold exceptionally well, and for “A Little Life” she took only seventy-five thousand dollars. (Picador, her British publisher, paid just seventy-five hundred.) Nevertheless, she had been willing to walk away if she could not have the book published her way. She didn’t need Doubleday’s acceptance “for my finances or my sense of identity,” she said. “I knew it was good enough that someone else would buy it.”
Hanging in Yanagihara’s loft, over her childhood bed, is a painting by Naoto Kawahara of a woman seen from above, floating vacantly in a bath. The colors are liquid and languid, but there is a tension to the work. The meaning of the image is ambiguous, but one’s mind travels to the question of who is looking down at the subject in this unblinking way. Is it a lover or an assailant?
I thought of the painting in the days before the publication of Yanagihara’s third novel, “To Paradise.” She was in a similarly exposed position. The hum of professional jealousy surrounding her was growing more audible: she had become a best-selling author without intending to, and without a critical consensus as to the value of her work. As she rarely went to literary parties and didn’t write book reviews, few owed her a kindness or a generous appraisal. Moreover, she did not tend to her readership in the way that some popular authors do, and it was possible that devotees of “A Little Life” would abandon her if she altered her subject and her style. One reader, who had obtained an advance copy of the book, posted, in bold, on Goodreads, “My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.” Others seemed more willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, while acknowledging that the novel wouldn’t hit the same target as “A Little Life.” But Yanagihara isn’t a timid artist. “It never occurred to me to write something people want to read,” she told me, adding that there would be no pleasure in writing the same book twice, just as there is none in putting out the same issue of a magazine. The point was to “try to push past what’s available in the format.”
She began “To Paradise” in 2016, after a discussion with Hohlt: What would Henry James’s “Washington Square” be like if it were retold as a story about same-sex marriage? How would the power dynamics shift? The emotional weight? James’s story, published as a serial in 1880, is simple: A father, Dr. Sloper, and his daughter battle over her independence. When an unworthy suitor appears, he blocks the marriage; afterward, father and daughter live together in a chilly stasis, with the doctor despising his daughter’s concession and the daughter refusing to give her bullying father the satisfaction of a firm renunciation of her lover.
Yanagihara was drawn to the familial psychopathology of “Washington Square”: a father who both loves his daughter and thinks that love gives him the right to control her; a daughter damaged by the very love that she cannot do without. “When you have been rejected by parents, you will never stop trying to please the parental figure,” Yanagihara said. The story’s style—more straightforward than other James works—also appealed to her. “You can say that Sloper is a very coarsely drawn character, or you can say that he is one of James’s most honest characters,” she said.
Yanagihara launched into a gay homage to “Washington Square,” toying with an alternative history of New York in which same-sex marriage has been legal since the eighteenth century. But she had also begun two other stories. One of them, set in the near-present, was about a descendant of Hawaiian royalty who tries to re-create the kingdom; the other took place in a future New York riven by disease. When Yanagihara told Hohlt that she was thinking of joining the narratives into a single tale, he responded that he didn’t think there was enough tissue binding them. She proceeded to try to solve the problem.
One way that she yoked the stories together was by setting them in the same town house on Washington Square. The stories also lined up chronologically in a pleasing way: the first part, the same-sex twist on James’s novel, takes place in 1893. Book II is set in 1993, at the height of the aids epidemic—a rich corporate lawyer is in residence, and his young boyfriend is the son of a man who is descended from Hawaiian royalty. Book III occurs in 2093, in a New York where climate change has intensified pandemics that have turned the city into a version of the beaten-down eighties New York that so captivates Yanagihara. In that story, the government has divided the town house into small apartments, one of which is occupied by a young woman who has been damaged, physically and emotionally, by the medicines she was given as a girl to survive an attack of the virus. Government officials and scientists try to contain the pandemic by sending the ill to die in isolated camps. I asked Yanagihara if this scenario, with its powerful but heartless scientific establishment, was a dig at her father; she said that I was certainly entitled to my speculation, but that she didn’t see it that way.
Some readers may assume that Yanagihara’s evocation of a pandemic was written off the news, yet she says that more than half the book was complete when covid struck. Mostly, she told me, she tried to ignore the advent of the new coronavirus. Yanagihara is an enthusiastic open-water swimmer, and, to explain how she wrote a novel about a pandemic in the midst of one, she invoked the sport: “One of the first things you learn is to quiet your mind, because if you don’t every passing shadow could be something—could be a beast or a submarine.”
Although the arch symmetries of “To Paradise” seem distant from the tempests of “A Little Life,” the central preoccupation is the same: how our need to be cared for leaves us perpetually vulnerable to hurt. Yanagihara said that shame was the interlocking theme of “To Paradise.” In each section, characters are “ashamed about essentially being unloved, about being unwanted, about being not special.” She quoted a passage from the novel: “While loving someone is not shameful, it is shameful not to be loved at all.” She added that unloved people tend to “feel deficient, as if they had somehow failed to live up to what it means to be a human.”
As with “A Little Life,” parts of the book have a perfervid tone: a blossoming friendship is upended when one of the friends plunges through a frozen lake. Faithful dogs play a role in conveying the dreadful news. Yanagihara struggles with writing historical dialogue, not seeming to care that her 1893 characters likely would not have used “supper” and “dinner” interchangeably, as we do. (An early negative critique, in Harper’s, notes that in the Old New York section her language “alternates between the anachronistic . . . and the archaic.”) Yanagihara has a gift for creating sympathetic characters and putting them in conflict with one another, but the book’s key conceit feels blurry. What is the significance of the three stories all taking place in the same Greenwich Village mansion, with three butlers all named Adams? Yanagihara told me that it had no particular meaning—and she clearly took pleasure in constructing such illusory patterns. But this may end up frustrating readers fond of books built along similar lines, like David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” and Michael Cunningham’s “Specimen Days,” both of which more clearly gain resonance from the way apparently disjunct sections fit together, suggesting where the author thinks our world is headed. Yanagihara’s loft décor works because the hundreds of disparate paintings and photographs on its walls—the vulgar and the elegant—combine into a single narrative. But she said, of her novel, “I’m O.K. with a little bit of confusion. I trust the reader is going to surrender to the spell of the book.”
Once again, nearly all the central relationships are homosexual. Yanagihara’s queer focus extends to T. Last spring, in response to a cover of the magazine that featured an eroticized male model wearing lush eyeshadow, a fashion executive jokingly posted, as an Instagram story, “The new OUT magazine looks fabulous in every single way.” I asked Yanagihara if there was a special significance to this aspect of her creative output. She did not find the question meaningful. “I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the gay-male identity that interests me,” she said. “If I were putting on my dime-store-psychologist hat, I would say more that it’s easier, freer, and safer to write about your own feelings as an outsider when cloaked in the identity of a different kind of outsider.”
Doubleday is giving “To Paradise,” for which it paid more than a million dollars, the kind of marketing push that it did not originally give to “A Little Life.” But, as Yanagihara put it in a recent interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, the reader “won’t find friends” in her new novel. The kinds of people who drew their own portraits of Jude, from “A Little Life,” and shared them online may not follow her into this more complex and iterative book. Yanagihara brushes such concerns aside. “I write only to please myself,” she said. “Just like I put out T only for myself.”
In early December, Yanagihara arranged for the Frick Collection—currently housed in the former Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue—to open an hour early, so that she could see a show there in privacy. That morning, she wore a Dries Van Noten sweater in gray—the only time I’d seen her out of black in public. She said, “Two of the remaining privileges of being a print editor in New York City are getting into restaurants when you want to and going to museums and galleries before and after hours.”
For the show, “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” contemporary paintings had been commissioned to hang in provocative juxtaposition with works from the Frick’s permanent collection. It was like a visual version of the jeu d’esprit that Yanagihara had played by making “Washington Square” a gay romance. A museum official met us at the staff entrance and took us up to the second floor. It was eerie to look at art without security guards. But Yanagihara was in her element, as if the Frick were an extension of her apartment. She stared at “Museum Boys,” a painting by the Pakistani-born artist Salman Toor, which hung in an alcove next to a Vermeer, “Mistress and Maid.” She’d featured Toor on a recent cover of T, and she said, “In his work, there’s always a sense of menace, sexy but in an ambiguous way.” Yanagihara then looked at the Vermeer, delighted to discover the artist’s signature “inky ultramarine” in the maid’s skirt. She observed that blue was a color that “a lot of artists had claimed as their own,” including Derek Jarman and Yves Klein.
After seeing the show, we drifted over to the Frick’s permanent exhibition. When Yanagihara passed Rembrandt’s “The Polish Rider,” she mentioned a Frank O’Hara poem that referenced the painting. We came to Van Dyck’s painting of Sir John Suckling, which featured a Latin quotation that translates as “Do not seek outside yourself.” Yanagihara said, of the motto, “That’s good!” At a display of Asian ceramics intermixed with Western copies, Yanagihara was happy that she couldn’t tell which was which. We entered a room of Fragonards. “Not my thing,” she said, adding, “John Currin has done Fragonard better than Fragonard.” She admitted, though, to being excited by the putti—“fucked-up babies,” she called them—sprinkled all over the canvases. She paused, then said, “I like babies. They smell so beautiful, and I like how you can watch them learning how to use their senses in real time. I just never wanted one of my own.”
Finally, we reached a famous Bellini painting, sometimes called “St. Francis in Ecstasy.” The saint’s face bore an uncanny similarity to that of the orgasmic man on the cover of “A Little Life.” I stepped aside as she took a photograph. Standing alone before the Bellini, she was rapt. Then the spell was broken: it was ten o’clock, and ticket holders had arrived. “The public!” Yanagihara cried, in mock alarm. And soon she was gone. ♦
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