ysa 🌾

The Secret History

Choose your favourite book cover

first of all the fact that the writer of the article basically speed-read a little life didn’t sit right with me. i don’t think it’s a book that’s easy to absorb at 2x speed as an audiobook, and i think reading it that way you lose a lot of the nuance and beauty and understanding.

i also found it weird that the writer critiqued yanagihara as paying a lot of detailed attention to food but minimally describing sex, or reserving sensations of pleasure within the narrative for food. i think part of this is that food is obviously a metaphor for love, friendship, richness, abundance (at least in the text of a little life. i haven’t gotten a copy of to paradise as it’s not released yet.) and i think pleasurable sex is often left out of literary fiction at the risk of readers feeling like it’s a romance novel- i’ve never read a long description of pleasurable sex in literary fiction bc it’s just something the genre doesn’t want. the purpose of a sex scene in literary fiction is never about pleasure it’s always about something else, because sexual pleasure is considered indulgent. romance novels are allowed to be indulgent in pleasure. literary fiction is not.

i think it’s odd and unfair to critique a writer on what they choose to write about- like the fact that yanagihara’s work features victims of childhood sexual abuse, or the fact that both a little life and to paradise largely revolve around gay male characters. we don’t know what yanagihara’s relationship to sexual abuse is. we don’t know if she has any experience with it. we don’t know if yanagihara is queer in any way, she’s never disclosed her sexuality, and assuming that she’s writing about these experiences and trying to exploit them for her benefit feels like a bad faith reading to me.

#Him

Hey! I'm Nate, I'm 19 years old and I just got my first testosterone receipt, which is amazing - but I need to pay for it until my gender marker change gets approved. Until then, it will cost me around 70 $ monthly, so if you could help me out by supporting my art that would mean a lot!!

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