Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara, 2016

Quotes

• 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)

• …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)