Fever dreams

Tim Adams on Hanya Yanahihara, at the Guardian (via Geoff Chadsey):

“I knew when I started it would be about 1,000 manuscript pages,” Yanagihara says, with the true novelist’s sense of fate. “I’d had the characters in my head for a long time. I was writing every single night and all weekend and it is not something I necessarily recommend. Though it was an exhilarating experience it was also an alienating one. In the first part of the book, JB [one of the four friends, an artist] is talking about painting and about how it becomes more real than life itself. That process, which I experienced, is absorbing and dangerous. It is probably one I will never have again, and one I never want again.”

Postscript

(Ah, a friend has tweeted my favorite part of the Bookforum review I was toiling over in April-May - shared here!)

@triaspirational beautifully anatomizes the magic-understated style of Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life in @bookforum pic.twitter.com/fvVN5nuMMo

— ScottSaul (@scottsaul4) June 2, 2015