ALSO BY HANYA YANAGIHARAThe People in the Trees This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidentseither are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actualpersons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.Copyright © 2015 by Hanya Yanagihara All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday,a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.www.doubleday.comDOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random HouseLLC.Jacket design by Cardon WebbJacket photograph: Orgasmic Man by Peter Hujar © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC. CourtesyPace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataYanagihara, Hanya.A little life : a novel / Hanya Yanagihara. — First edition.pages; cmISBN 978-0-385-53925-8 (hardcover) —ISBN 978-0-385-53926-5 (eBook)1. Families—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.PS3625.A674L58 2015813′.6—dc23 2014027379v3.1 To Jared Hohltin friendship; with love ContentsCoverOther Books by This AuthorTitle PageCopyrightDedicationI LISPENARD STREETChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3II THE POSTMANChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3III VANITIESChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3IV THE AXIOM OF EQUALITYChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3V THE HAPPY YEARSChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3VI DEAR COMRADEChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3VII LISPENARD STREETAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author 1THE ELEVENTH APARTMENT had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass doorthat opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting acrossthe way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October,smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn’t waveback.In the bedroom, Jude was accordioning the closet door, opening and shuttingit, when Willem came in. “There’s only one closet,” he said.“That’s okay,” Willem said. “I have nothing to put in it anyway.”“Neither do I.” They smiled at each other. The agent from the buildingwandered in after them. “We’ll take it,” Jude told her.But back at the agent’s office, they were told they couldn’t rent the apartmentafter all. “Why not?” Jude asked her.“You don’t make enough to cover six months’ rent, and you don’t haveanything in savings,” said the agent, suddenly terse. She had checked their creditand their bank accounts and had at last realized that there was something amissabout two men in their twenties who were not a couple and yet were trying torent a one-bedroom apartment on a dull (but still expensive) stretch of Twenty-fifth Street. “Do you have anyone who can sign on as your guarantor? A boss?Parents?”“Our parents are dead,” said Willem, swiftly.The agent sighed. “Then I suggest you lower your expectations. No one whomanages a well-run building is going to rent to candidates with your financialprofile.” And then she stood, with an air of finality, and looked pointedly at thedoor.When they told JB and Malcolm this, however, they made it into a comedy:the apartment floor became tattooed with mouse droppings, the man across theway had almost exposed himself, the agent was upset because she had beenflirting with Willem and he hadn’t reciprocated.“Who wants to live on Twenty-fifth and Second anyway,” asked JB. Theywere at Pho Viet Huong in Chinatown, where they met twice a month for dinner.Pho Viet Huong wasn’t very good—the pho was curiously sugary, the lime juicewas soapy, and at least one of them got sick after every meal—but they keptcoming, both out of habit and necessity. You could get a bowl of soup or asandwich at Pho Viet Huong for five dollars, or you could get an entrée, whichwere eight to ten dollars but much larger, so you could save half of it for the next day or for a snack later that night. Only Malcolm never ate the whole of hisentrée and never saved the other half either, and when he was finished eating, heput his plate in the center of the table so Willem and JB—who were alwayshungry—could eat the rest.“Of course we don’t want to live at Twenty-fifth and Second, JB,” saidWillem, patiently, “but we don’t really have a choice. We don’t have anymoney, remember?”“I don’t understand why you don’t stay where you are,” said Malcolm, whowas now pushing his mushrooms and tofu—he always ordered the same dish:oyster mushrooms and braised tofu in a treacly brown sauce—around his plate,as Willem and JB eyed it.“Well, I can’t,” Willem said. “Remember?” He had to have explained this toMalcolm a dozen times in the last three months. “Merritt’s boyfriend’s movingin, so I have to move out.”“But why do you have to move out?”“Because it’s Merritt’s name on the lease, Malcolm!” said JB.“Oh,” Malcolm said. He was quiet. He often forgot what he consideredinconsequential details, but he also never seemed to mind when people grewimpatient with him for forgetting. “Right.” He moved the mushrooms to thecenter of the table. “But you, Jude—”“I can’t stay at your place forever, Malcolm. Your parents are going to kill meat some point.”“My parents love you.”“That’s nice of you to say. But they won’t if I don’t move out, and soon.”Malcolm was the only one of the four of them who lived at home, and as JBliked to say, if he had Malcolm’s home, he would live at home too. It wasn’t asif Malcolm’s house was particularly grand—it was, in fact, creaky and ill-kept,and Willem had once gotten a splinter simply by running his hand up its banister—but it was large: a real Upper East Side town house. Malcolm’s sister, Flora,who was three years older than him, had moved out of the basement apartmentrecently, and Jude had taken her place as a short-term solution: Eventually,Malcolm’s parents would want to reclaim the unit to convert it into offices forhis mother’s literary agency, which meant Jude (who was finding the flight ofstairs that led down to it too difficult to navigate anyway) had to look for hisown apartment.And it was natural that he would live with Willem; they had been roommatesthroughout college. In their first year, the four of them had shared a space thatconsisted of a cinder-blocked common room, where sat their desks and chairsand a couch that JB’s aunts had driven up in a U-Haul, and a second, far tinier room, in which two sets of bunk beds had been placed. This room had been sonarrow that Malcolm and Jude, lying in the bottom bunks, could reach out andgrab each other’s hands. Malcolm and JB had shared one of the units; Jude andWillem had shared the other.“It’s blacks versus whites,” JB would say.“Jude’s not white,” Willem would respond.“And I’m not black,” Malcolm would add, more to annoy JB than because hebelieved it.“Well,” JB said now, pulling the plate of mushrooms toward him with thetines of his fork, “I’d say you could both stay with me, but I think you’d fuckinghate it.” JB lived in a massive, filthy loft in Little Italy, full of strange hallwaysthat led to unused, oddly shaped cul-de-sacs and unfinished half rooms, theSheetrock abandoned mid-construction, which belonged to another person theyknew from college. Ezra was an artist, a bad one, but he didn’t need to be goodbecause, as JB liked to remind them, he would never have to work in his entirelife. And not only would he never have to work, but his children’s children’schildren would never have to work: They could make bad, unsalable, worthlessart for generations and they would still be able to buy at whim the best oils theywanted, and impractically large lofts in downtown Manhattan that they couldtrash with their bad architectural decisions, and when they got sick of the artist’slife—as JB was convinced Ezra someday would—all they would need to do iscall their trust officers and be awarded an enormous lump sum of cash of anamount that the four of them (well, maybe not Malcolm) could never dream ofseeing in their lifetimes. In the meantime, though, Ezra was a useful person toknow, not only because he let JB and a few of his other friends from school stayin his apartment—at any time, there were four or five people burrowing invarious corners of the loft—but because he was a good-natured and basicallygenerous person, and liked to throw excessive parties in which copious amountsof food and drugs and alcohol were available for free.“Hold up,” JB said, putting his chopsticks down. “I just realized—there’ssomeone at the magazine renting some place for her aunt. Like, just on the vergeof Chinatown.”“How much is it?” asked Willem.“Probably nothing—she didn’t even know what to ask for it. And she wantssomeone in there that she knows.”“Do you think you could put in a good word?”“Better—I’ll introduce you. Can you come by the office tomorrow?”Jude sighed. “I won’t be able to get away.” He looked at Willem.“Don’t worry—I can. What time?”
