![]() Plenty of males are preyed upon in the same way, of course, but there remains a certain and specific shame surrounding the subject. Parents worry that their boys might be killed in an accident or in some act of violence they worry their daughters might be raped. It’s something we grow up knowing, because for many women (as history and mythology have taught us), it’s a real threat. I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t at least worried at some point in her life - if only fleetingly - that she might be in sexual danger, that she might be preyed upon. The way Jude handles his past is meant to be particularly male as well. Again, I’m not saying that’s a bad or good thing - one needn’t confess everything to a friend to be known by him - but I do think that a friendship between two women (once again, for better or worse) is yoked by shared confessions. In A Little Life, one of the things I most enjoyed exploring is how these men’s friendships, while close by anyone’s definition, are also built upon a mutual desire to not truly know too much. I had intended him, in many ways, as a fundamentally naive character, one who allows himself to mistake perversion for love. In The People in the Trees, one could argue - as I would - that the narrator, Perina, behaves the way he does in part out of a grotesque and misshapen interpretation of loneliness. Male friendship, by which I mean a friendship between two men, is by its very nature different in scope and breadth than one between two women, or between a woman and a man. I do think that men, almost uniformly, no matter their race or cultural affiliations or religion or sexuality, are equipped with a far more limited emotional toolbox.Īs a writer, it’s a great gift - and an interesting challenge - to write about a group of people who are fundamentally limited in this way (and who happen to be half the world’s population). I’m not saying this is bad or good only that when it comes to matters of the self, and self-identity, society teaches you what’s allowable to feel and communicate. It’s like that famous study of depression in Japan: the respondents self-identified a set of symptoms that here would be the means to diagnose them with clinical depression. But in order to name emotions, you have to be taught to name them. Maybe this is changing with younger men, but I sometimes listen to my male friends talk, and can understand that what they’re trying to communicate is fear, or shame, or vulnerability - even as I find it striking that they’re not even able to name those emotions, never mind discuss their specificities they talk in contours, but not in depth. Not endemically, perhaps - but there’s no society that I know of that encourages men to put words to the sort of feelings - much less encourages their expression of those feelings - that women get to take for granted. But I do think that men, almost uniformly, no matter their race or cultural affiliations or religion or sexuality, are equipped with a far more limited emotional toolbox. Hanya Yanagihara: My best friend - who’s a man of tremendous depth of emotional perception and intelligence - disagrees with me somewhat on this point. Could you speak more about that and why you have chosen to write primarily about men? You have said that men often have a smaller emotional vocabulary than women do (an idea a female therapist also shared with me, coincidentally). We discussed trigger warnings, empathy, the limits of psychology, and suicide.Īdalena Kavanagh: A Little Life centers on the friendships of four men, and your previous novel, The People in the Trees, also mainly centered around male characters. Yanagihara and I corresponded through e-mail over the course of a few weeks as she traveled in Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Japan. Either way, she asks the tough questions: how do we live, and why? Yanagihara would argue that this isn’t a story about trauma but about life. Unable to heal himself, or be healed by others, Jude is a character that calls into question the redemptive narrative arc we too often expect from stories of trauma. Francis suffered, and barely survived, with the understanding that the brutality of the witnessing cannot compare to the experience itself. The reader bears witness to the aftermath of the childhood abuse Jude St. Francis, a successful lawyer by any measure, but a man who remains an enigma to friends and family nearly to the end. The darkness at the center of this novel emanates from Jude St.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |