Hanya Yanagihara: ‘Don’t we read fiction exactly to be upset?’

The author of the acclaimed novel A Little Life asks what it means to be ‘brave’ as a writer

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the word “brave”, and what it might actually mean in our current vernacular. Who is brave? What is brave? Is brave fighting a war, enduring an illness, expressing who you are in gender and in sexuality? Is it ignoring authority, is it respecting it? The word is perhaps more broadly applied than it ever was – this was a word that for years seemed to most often be paired with acts of physical valour, with stoicism, with traditional masculinity, with brawn – and yet we’ve also become ever more sensitive to who is deserving of the adjective.

I began thinking of what “brave” meant when someone, a reader, told me my book was brave. I thanked him, because although I wasn’t sure what inspired the compliment, I knew it was indeed one. Later, I thought about what he might mean: was it because the book was unexpected (but that’s not bravery, at least not in my interpretation of the word)? When we say a novel is brave, what do we mean?

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