I told Hanya, ‘We have only four hours to give people that same sensation,’ so we tried to be minimalistic with maximal effect.” It’s 750 pages it takes a week or two to read it, if you’re quick.

“The book is intense, and we wanted the people to have the same sensation,” van Hove adds. I think, for some people, it’s really very confronting, what they see on stage-the cutting, the violence, the medical care, the smells we use. “At different levels and different moments,” Versweyveld notes of the Edinburgh and Amsterdam performances, “at least one or two people are fainting and the show has to be stopped. It talks about gruesome things-the structural violence and sexual abuse of a seven-year-old boy until he is 50 years old and the brutal, lifelong consequences of that trauma. It became, instantly, like a mythical figure, which is strange when you think about it. “Not a contemporary classic an instant classic,” as stage director Ivo van Hove points out.

Love it or hate it, the 2015 tome left an immediate, indelible mark. The Atlantic called it “the great gay novel” The New York Review of Books deemed it “a striptease” in a derogatory way. A 750-page epic of pain, friendship, shifting queerness, exploitation, and shame following the lives of four college friends, its operatic highs and lows have inspired constant discourse, fueled as much by praise for its stunning prose and scope as by condemnation of its graphic descriptions of childhood sexual abuse and self-harm. It’s disorienting to realize that Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel A Little Life came out more than seven years ago, given the ironclad grip it’s maintained on the culture.

It's a little life