Hanya Yanagihara: ‘I wanted everything turned up a little too high’

Hanya Yanagihara’s no-holds-barred second novel A Little Life has established her as a major new voice in US fiction. Here she talks about writing in a ‘fevered’ state, and a childhood spent drawing cadavers and waiting in motel rooms…

What of our childhood will survive? When Hanya Yanagihara, a singular, formidable new voice in American fiction, was 10 or 11 and living in Texas, she had an interest in drawing portraits. Her father, a doctor from Hawaii, unsentimental about bodies, keen that his daughter should follow her passions with rigour, had a friend who was a pathologist. He persuaded the pathologist to let his daughter accompany her to the morgue, in order to draw from the flesh.

“She would pull out cadavers and open them up for me so I could draw them,” Yanagihara says. “It was really wonderful. She was a very cool lady. They were already neatly cut and she would fold back the flaps. I would have loved to be a scientist. Disease really fascinates me, what an invader can do to the host body from an imperial perspective but also as an infection…”

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