The most reliable route to becoming a novelist is that of the outsider, and this was Yanagihara’s path. And it’s something that I do in private.” She said, “I find that, whether from a sort of evil-eye avoidance superstition, or from not feeling that I quite have the right to call myself a writer-I don’t know what this is about, really, but I feel that writer is not something that I am, it is something that I do. Indeed, she knows almost no other novelists, because she isn’t comfortable among them. As she put it, “Once I’ve poured the concrete, I don’t rebuild the foundation.” Despite the extraordinary success of her fiction career, she regards it as a “slightly shameful” sideline.
After she has hit on a plot and a structure she sticks to them, as if revising risks collapse. Like “A Little Life,” it exceeds seven hundred pages. She completed her new novel, “ To Paradise”-which stages three radically different narratives, set in three centuries, at the same town house in Washington Square-during the pandemic. She writes at night, for long stretches when the words are flowing. Yanagihara is more confident talking about her magazine editing than about her novelistic abilities. TikTokers post videos of themselves crying after finishing the book. It’s still easy to find readers talking online, with odd pleasure, about the emotional devastation that reading “A Little Life” brought upon them. But it has sold more than a million and a half copies in English alone. The critical reception to the book was very divided: it was called a “ great gay novel” by one critic, and a “ ghastly litany” by another. Like her magazine, the novel is proudly baroque. Her 2015 book, “ A Little Life,” begins as the story of the friendships among four recent college graduates, then cascades into an operatic, often appalling, chronicle of the abuse suffered by one of the protagonists. Yanagihara is also a novelist with a large readership. When she takes her trips, she packs a suitcase that, a friend says, is “almost as small as the one in ‘Rear Window.’ ”
“You either go to Omen, Raoul’s, or Fanelli’s if you live down here, and I go to Omen,” she declared, adding that she wanted to sit at a particular table in the back. She lives in a narrow SoHo loft, decorated with art and antiques and baubles, that she calls her “pod.” She rarely goes out and likes her place to be tidy-she won’t host dinner parties because she doesn’t “want the crumbs.” We once agreed to meet at a local restaurant. Yanagihara’s private life is as constrained as her cultural knowledge is broad. Fashion and design spreads are now steeped in art history, and the magazine publishes essays that are surprising, and sometimes esoteric: an analysis of avant-garde flower arrangers a rigorous survey of artists, from Japan to South Africa, who are “reimagining the animal figurine.” She took over T four years ago, and, thanks to her magpie intelligence, it has become a vibrant cabinet of curiosities. She has spent a lot of time travelling and has an unusually international aesthetic: she is as comfortable speaking about ceramicists in Sendai as about conceptual artists in New York. Through her editorial work, Yanagihara, who is forty-seven, has become conversant with hundreds of creative people and their work. She is the editor-in-chief of T, the style supplement to the Times, which publishes articles and photo-essays about fashion, travel, art, and design. Hanya Yanagihara wears her black hair pulled back with a razor-sharp center part, and she prefers to dress in black, especially in clothes by Dries Van Noten, the cerebral Belgian designer.
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