In this way, Nureyev’s body betrays him as Jude’s does, making him a richly symbolic figure for Yanagihara to include among the book’s scant cultural references. He publicly denied his illness for years, though by the late 1980s his health began to decline and his dancing abilities suffered. He died of AIDS complications at age 54, less than a decade after testing positive for HIV. He is considered either gay or bisexual (he had heterosexual relationships with women when he was younger). Nureyev became and international sensation and one of the greatest male ballet dancers of his generation. The last film that Willem Makes, The Happy Days, is about the final years of Rudolf Nureyev, a Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer who famously was the first Soviet artist to defect during the Cold War. There are passing cultural references scattered throughout, however. Leaving out historical reference points also gives the story a timeless and universal quality. The effect of this is that the reader can direct all their focus to characters’ emotional states. For instance, though much of the plot unfolds in New York, the novel makes no reference to the September 11 terrorist attacks. She published her third novel, To Paradise, in 2022.Ĭuriously, A Little Life contains very few references to pop culture or historical events, making it effectively impossible to situate the novel in a specific point in time.

Following the success of A Little Life, Yanagihara accepted a position a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, eventually becoming the magazine’s editor-in-chief in 2017. A Little Life followed in 2015 and was met with much critical success-it was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker prize for fiction, and it was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. She published her first novel, The People in the Trees, in 2013. During this time, she also worked as a writer and editor for Conde Nast Traveler. From there, she moved to New York to work as a publicist. Yanagihara attended high school in Hawaii and went on to graduate from Smith College in 1995. Her father was a hematologist and oncologist who introduced Yanagihara to the works of Philip Roth, Iris Murdoch, and Barbara Pym. She and her family moved frequently, and as a child, she lived in various places throughout the United States, including New York and Hawaii. Hanya Yanagihara was born in 1975 in Los Angeles.

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