Ten years of ‘A Little Life’: Why is Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘trauma porn’ novel still so popular?

Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life, released ten years ago, has become a contemporary classic – with notoriety and acclaim boosting its profile in equal measure.

The novel begins by following four friends – Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm – as they navigate careers, relationships and friendship in New York. However, it quickly comes to focus on the story of Jude, gradually revealing his deeply traumatic childhood and the ways it is affecting his adult life.

In 2022, UK publisher Picador re-released the novel as part of its new Picador Collection – a range of “era-defining modern classics”. But how has a novel with such harrowing content become one of the most popular books of the last decade?

This is one of the clearest examples of the “trauma plot”, which literary critic Parul Sehgal has identified as a defining feature of our contemporary cultural landscape. The trauma plot refers to stories fixated on the traumatic events experienced by their characters, perhaps neglecting other aspects of characterisation or plotting in favour of detailed explorations of trauma.

American essayist Daniel Mendelsohn’s early critique in the New York Review of Books countered the novel’s extensive praise elsewhere. He claimed the relentless trauma and abuse suffered by Jude turns it into “a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the...

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