Elliott Smith invented coquette core šāØ
Simon and Wilhelm's "we haven't done anything wrong" conversation is one of the most important moments of queer representation on TV.
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Okay, so, I just want to talk about this a little bit.Ā Iām going to go into some pretty heavy spoilers for this book here, so if you havenāt read it yet, you should skip this post.
Iāve seen some people accuse and refer to the violence and abuse we see in A Little Life asĀ ātorture pornā, saying itās excessive and unnecessary, using their own shocked reactions and otherwise dry-eyed responses during such scenes in the book to back up their claims.Ā I want to address this, because I think itās an entirely wrong take, and Iāll just explain why.
The entire point of A Little Life is to confront the reader with the reality of certain sorts of lives.Ā And as Hanya Yanaghihara has said, some lives, the lives we donāt see, the lives we are often so afraid to look at, are violent lives, brutal lives, torturous lives.Ā And this book specifically forces the reader to come to terms with those violent sorts of lives, and to come to terms with the consequences, with the results of people, specifically children, living through real violence and abuse.Ā
The abuse Jude goes through in the book is extreme, yes, but not anywhere near impossible, or even improbable.Ā These sorts of things DO happen to people, every day.Ā Once again, just because we donāt see it, or hear about it, doesnāt mean it isnāt happening.Ā It is.Ā And what this book does, what makes it so important, is that it forces us, the reader, to look at something, and acknowledge something as existing, that we otherwise would likely turn away from and pretend wasnāt there.Ā The book doesnāt allow you to do that.Ā It MAKES you look, and so, it makes you see the people that have gone through the kinds of horrors Jude goes through.Ā It makes you aware, whether you want to be or not, of their existence.
Now, in terms of practical story telling, the abuse and violence we see in the book is also necessary, and hereās why.
In order for the reader to fully comprehend why Jude is as damaged as he is, we need to see what caused that damage.Ā Judeās struggle in the present, his mental health issues, his self-loathing, his inability, no matter how many people tell him he is deserving of kindness and love, no matter how many people tell him heās good, or extraordinary, his inability to believe it, the impossibility for him to believe it, needs to be explained.Ā Because Judeās life IS a good one, on the surface.Ā Heās professionally and personally successful.Ā He has a high paying, important job, he has numerous friends who love and adore him, he has enough money to live a comfortable life of privilege and luxury, heās respected, etcā¦Ā So why is he so messed up?Ā Making vague, half-hidden allusions to a dark and abuse filled past wouldnāt be satisfying enough, narratively, to explain away WHY Jude hates himself as much as he does, why he feels the need to self-harm to such an extreme and devastating degree, why his memories haunt and torture him so persistently, why heās so unable to make them stop.Ā A Little Life deals largely in psychology, and patterns of behavior.Ā Jude thinks very specific things about himself, all of which are rooted in the abuse he suffered as a child.Ā His belief that heās unclean, that heās spoiled and guilty, his belief that heās a bad person, his inability to say no, or to defend himself, or understand that he even is ALLOWED to defend himself, his cutting, etc⦠All of this is tied up, inextricably, with what happened to him in childhood.Ā We, as readers, NEEDED to witness Judeās past in order to understand his present.Ā Without it, without witnessing specifically what it is that happened to him in his childhood, we wouldnāt have nearly the psychological understanding of Jude that we end up having.Ā His struggles and difficulties and sufferings in the present wouldnāt make any sense to us.Ā We would wonder, by the end, why it was he felt he needed to end his life, rather then the perfect understanding weāre actually left with, rather then the empathy we have for his choice, and so one of the driving and most important themes of the book (the question of justified suicide, of what makes life unendurable) would be lost, and that would be a massive failure, and make the book far lesser as a work of art.Ā With the inclusion of Judeās past, the detailed and unflinching view we get into his past, we arenāt left to wonder why heās as broken and damaged as he is, we donāt question his pain and suffering, we donāt ever think heās being overdramatic or self-indulgent.Ā Instead we understand perfectly why he is the way he is.Ā As Andy tells Willem at one point, make him tell you what happened to him, and youāll understand why he is the way he is.Ā Like Willem needed to hear the truth, as brutal and horrible as it was, we too, as readers, needed to hear it as well.
Thereās one other point I want to address too, which Iāve heard some people posit as proof that the violence and abuse we see in the book was included only for the sake of shock value.Ā They say during these scenes of past abuse, they felt more shocked than anything, but didnāt find themselves tearing up or particularly emotional, and this is somehow supposed to be proof that the scenes are excessive and unnecessary and only included to shock the reader.
To me, this claim only shows poor reading comprehension.Ā It shows a failure to understand the view point presented in these flashbacks.
All of the abuse scenes are told from Judeās perspective.Ā We are witnessing them through Judeās eyes.Ā One point Hanya Yanagihara has made again and again in interviews about child abuse, about what makes it such a particularly awful thing, is that children donāt possess the intellectual or emotional capacity to understand what it is thatās happening to them, and so they arenāt able to process it at all.Ā They arenāt able to comprehend it.
While these things are happening to Jude, then, while heās being beaten, or emotionally, mentally, or sexually abused, he doesnāt have the mental or emotional maturity yet to comprehend why these things are happening to him, or what these things even are.Ā And again, remember, these scenes are told to us through Judeās perspective on them, his thoughts, his feelings.Ā Jude canāt understand whatās happening to him.Ā While we as readers can understand it, and know intellectually that what is occurring is a tragedy, and heartbreaking, Jude can only respond to it with fear and confusion.Ā He doesnāt have the mental or emotional capacity yet to be heartbroken, or sad, over whatās happening.Ā He only has the capacity to be confused and afraid.Ā And those are the emotions weāre presented with during these scenes.Ā Confusion and fear.
Early on in the abuse, Jude also responds in the way children do when something is happening to them that they donāt understand.Ā He throws temper tantrums.Ā He becomes violent, screaming and throwing himself against walls and onto the floor, rebelling in a confused state of pain and terror to something that he can sense is bad, but doesnāt yet understand WHY itās so.Ā Eventually, in response to these tantrums, his abusers beat him badly enough, enough times, that Jude learns responding at all to whatās happening to him only makes it worse, and so he learns to repress what heās feeling.Ā He stops throwing tantrums, he stops screaming, he stops crying, and he shuts down.Ā Again, remember, these flashbacks are being shown to us entirely from Judeās perspective.Ā So he shuts down and goes entirely within himself, learning, even , to disassociate during instances of abuse, to pretend it isnāt happening to him.Ā That heās only somehow witnessing the event, not experiencing it.Ā The scenes of abuse then take on a dreary, resigned, defeated quality.Ā Theyāre MEANT TO.Ā Because, again, weāre experiencing them through Judeās perspective.Ā The abuse becomes an almost mundane, agonizing and oppressive part of his every day life.Ā An inescapable reality for him.Ā A common and inevitable part of his existence.Ā Jude falls into a state of despair.Ā He isnāt consciously aware of feeling anything but that resignation, then, and we feel that resignation with him.Ā Extremity of emotion is missing from these scenes on purpose, because weāre meant to feel what Jude is feeling, which is nothing at a certain point.Ā He disassociates, detaches, and represses his anger and pain and fear.Ā Itās the only way he has of coping with the brutality of his life.Ā Ā
I think itās also important to acknowledge the sinister, creeping nature of the abuse, and how itās portrayed, especially in regards to Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor.Ā More than intending to make the reader feel sad, or heartbroken, the scenes with these two, main abusers are meant to invoke in the reader a real sense of unease and unsettlement and fear.Ā Weāre aware, in a way Jude is not, that these men are manipulating him, and that their apparent kindness is nothing more than a ruse.Ā Our awareness of this reality, while simultaneously witnessing Judeās ignorance and naivety, while witnessing his trust, is incredibly disturbing, because we know these men are going to molest him at some point.Ā This isnāt meant to make us cry, so much as itās meant to make us deeply uncomfortable and frightened for Jude.Ā We know whatās coming, even as Jude doesnāt, and itās awful to see.Ā And then, once again, we experience the abuse through Judeās perspective, and once again, because of his lack of emotional or mental maturity, because of his inability to fully understand whatās happening to him, the emotions we find conjured in us are ones of confusion and fear and despair, rather than extreme heartbreak.Ā These scenes arenāt meant to make us cry, theyāre meant to make us understand what Jude is experiencing and feeling during this period of his life, which is, after a certain point, just simply resignation, and an oppressive sense of inescapability.Ā More than anything, it is an endless drudge of misery with no end in sight, and thatās the feeling we as readers are left with, because itās what Jude himself is feeling.Ā He rarely cries, he never shows anger, he never rebels.Ā He never shows any extremity of emotion.Ā He is, more and more, introverted and emotionally suppressed, and once again, that oppressive inevitability which marks his existence is the primary feeling weāre left with.
It isnāt until Jude is older, and able to mentally comprehend what actually happened to him, that the heartbreaking tragedy behind it all comes more to the surface, and the emotions Jude, and thus, the reader, go through are more extreme in their intensity.Ā When Jude starts to realize, as an adult, the nature of what was actually done to him, thatās when weāre met with more emotionally charged reactions from him, and in turn, we find ourselves responding with more emotion.Ā Itās why Judeās struggles in the present are so heartbreaking, because heās no longer able to separate himself from the act like he had as a child, he is no longer able to pretend it happened to someone else, to escape inside himself, to shut down emotionally.Ā Heās hit with the full brunt of his reality, and itās devastating, both to him, and to us.Ā Ā
Hanya Yanaghihara has said that children are far more accepting of terrible living conditions and abuse and ill treatment than an adult would be, because they simply donāt know any better, because they simply donāt know anything else.Ā Whatever their lives are, thatās all they can imagine as reality.Ā They canāt imagine anything past it.Ā And thatās what we see with Jude.Ā As a child, while all of these terrible things are happening to him, he grows to simply accept it as his reality, and canāt imagine a life beyond it, and so he reacts to it with a deadened resignation.Ā Thereās an oppressive, suffocating sense to what heās experiencing, more than extreme sadness, and once again, we as readers are meant to experience that oppressive suffocation with him.Ā When he grows up, and his life improves, and he learns that life can be not just better, but infinitely so, thatās when he starts to understand what happened to him, when he begins to understand the injustice and cruelty of it, and the heartbreaking aspect of it becomes more clear, to both him and to us.
So, in conclusion, the arguments or criticisms people level at this book, particularly in regard to the scenes of abuse, donāt, in my view, hold much, if any weight, because they seem to fail entirely to grasp the purpose behind any of it.Ā It makes them uncomfortable, which itās meant to, and because it makes them uncomfortable, theyāve decided, as a means of relieving that discomfort, to dismiss it as unnecessary and excessive and included only for shock value, as a cheap trick to ring emotion out of the reader.Ā Again, these sorts of takes fail to understand the purpose or importance of Judeās past being revealed the way it is.Ā This book is uncompromising, and understands the necessity of facing the ugly reality of child abuse head on.Ā It understands that it achieves nothing by skirting around the issue, or by coddling the reader and making the grim and horrific reality of its subject matter more palatable for them.Ā It would do both a disservice to Jude as a character, and our understanding of why he ends up where he does, and a disservice to real life victims of child abuse, who arenāt afforded the luxury of getting to pretend that what happened to them wasnāt so bad, who arenāt afforded the luxury of looking at it askance and at a remove.Ā The point of this book is to show the lifelong and devastating consequences of child abuse.Ā Jude is unable to escape the pain and vividness of his memories.Ā He canāt get away from them.Ā Heās made to live with them every moment of every day of his life,Ā Ā made to relive the horror of his past again and again, and the reader too is meant to be unable to escape it, is made to relive those moments with him, precisely so that they can then better understand Judeās suffering, and why life is so difficult for him.Ā Ā
Thatās the entire point.
jude st. francis + willem ragnarsson
āmy best friend and the love of my lifeā
(suicide cw) (a little life spoilers) I habitually go back to the last portion of the book. As I read it the first time, I was only dimly aware this was the ending. I could see the number of pages, sure, and the repetitive title of Lispenard Street was ominous enough that I shouldāve known - after all, why else would you bookend it like that?
I think it didnāt hit me initially, though, because for all the arduous buildup, all the scares, this is all we get of Judeās death.
We get the aftermath, of course (and naturally I sobbed through it) - but this is the tragedy weāre led to anticipate the whole book through, and so, aware of its inevitability, Iād expected all the magnitude of Judeās suicide attempt, of all the tragedies that followed. But Judeās life gets 800 pages and his death gets two sentences.
The story doesnāt end on an ending. It ends on Lispenard Street.
This is what Harold leaves us with: kindness, and a father and his grinning son reminiscing; and of course thatās how he would tell Judeās story, of course thatās how you would speak of someone you love, after: with all the kindness of eternity. People arenāt endings. Judeās life wasnāt a stopgap, it was the story.
I can see how A Little Life might be read as a gruesome, cobweb veiled backstory to a suicide to many. Thatās certainly how Jude would see it, at times, I think; but thatās why Harold is the narrator. (Harold, to whom Judeās life was so precious, who treasured it so wholly and selfishly, as parents often do.)
And so, as weāre taken back to Lispenard Street, I canāt possibly read this story as anything other than a love letter ā from a father, to his sonās life.
When Fiona Apple sang, āHow can I ask anyone to love me, when all I do is beg to be left alone,ā and when Mitski sang, āyouāre growing tired of me, and all the things I donāt talk about,ā and when Julien Baker sang, āitās not easy when what you think of me is important, and I know it shouldnāt be so damn important, but it is to me,ā and when Elliott Smith sang, āIām alone but thatās okay, I donāt mind most of the time; I donāt feel afraid to die,ā and when the Front Bottoms sang, āsometimes you get sad when weāre together because youāre not sure if youāll miss me when Iām gone,ā and when