@Gin Jenny OK, now that I have read these details of the abuse, it sounds way too excessive to me as well. This book must have been really beautifully written that it got such fine reviews with such an over-the-top sounding plot.

Not for me though.

I hope I haven’t oversold it! I am super excited to hear what y’all think!

Oh, God, me too. I read it in 2014, but yeah — it was probably my most favorite book of 2014, definitely the one that made the biggest impact on me.

So, I a hundred percent agree with that. It’s not that terrible things don’t happen to children, because they do, of course. But — and I have a hard time articulating exactly what I want to say here — I don’t think that Yanagihara is engaging in any real way with the kinds of terrible things that actually do happen to children. Or to say it another way, it doesn’t seem like she read a ton about child sex abuse and wrote this book from an informed perspective (which would have been difficult to read, but I would have been really interested in it); it seems much more like she thought of as many horrible things that might ever happen to someone as she could, and then threw them all at Jude.

Hahha, glad I could help. 🙂

It’s so interesting to me, because work experience is exactly the reason I found the abuse so frustrating. I have worked with people who have experienced a lot of trauma, but this is not the trauma that people experience in real life. Not the whole monastery full of monks, then being kidnapped and prostituted by another monk, then being kidnapped and like locked in a basement? By a crazy random doctor he just happened to come across? And then that guy runs him over with a car just to be a dick? I don’t know, it was all really excessive, and it felt like Yanagihara was using narrative excess to avoid actually engaging in a thoughtful way with the experience of abuse.

I’m so interested to see how other people have responded to this book. I thought that everyone was going to find it implausible (honestly, to the point of being laughable!), but it seems like very few people have.

Hahahaha, you really missed out on some prime suffering opportunities then! Killing them off at the end was the WAY TO GO. (I say that, but in fact the scenes after Jude died often tore at my heart. True facts.)