The main reason I initially set out to read A Little Life by, Hanya Yanagihara was to have this conversation about realistic trauma in fiction. Most conversations surrounding A Little Life are about how it’s just “trauma p*rn,” the content is actually “unrealistic” and it’s there for the sake of shock value.
I want push back on this idea; just because content is graphic, hard to stomach, etc. (for some - people have differing tolerance levels: ) doesn’t mean that it’s unrealistic. So here are the questions I’m posing: What role does realistic trauma and realistic graphic content have in fiction? If A Little Life was a non-fiction memoir, would people still be calling it “trauma p*rn?” Do we expect fiction to “soften” reality, even though it’s framework is often mirrors life?
I also have two other books here, that I read this year that I think nicely fit into this category of realistic content in fiction that may make some readers…. squirm - Lolita by, Vladimir Nabokov and the recently published The Wolf Den by, Elodie Harper. The plot of Lolita is generally known, and though it’s definitely disturbing to say the least, and I totally understand why many people choose not to read Lolita, I found it to be quite realistic. We can’t deny that there is a subgroup of individuals that think this way about children and it’s actually more common than most people would like to acknowledge. The Wolf Den focuses on the life of prostitutes in Ancient Rome. Harper does not hold back with the realities of what they have to face. A Little Life, Lolita and The Wolf Den are extremely similar, sometimes so similar that it’s almost eerie, to the countless interviews I’m listened to of people sharing their trauma and abuse stories. In the majority of these interviews, the abuse began when the individual was a child and how they attribute that abuse to the continued abuse that they experienced in adulthood and the psychological and emotional impact it’s had on them.
So, with Jude in A Little Life, nothing about the background that Yanagihara created for this character, was shocking to me. Jude’s childhood is far more common than people realize and in fact, I’ve heard of real stories even more insane than Jude’s - stories that in no way seem like they could be real; stories that took me months to process. There was one story in particular that was so “out there” that I had to stop listening to it, do research on what the person was talking about and then revisit the person’s story a year later to connect some dots.
So let’s circle back around to the questions that are floating around in my brain that I presented in the beginning of this post. Why is it that when we come across this type of content, especially when it’s in fiction, we write it off as voyeurism? “Oh, this is sensationalism.” Why does fiction, that is uncomfortably realistic, get categorized as “trauma p*rn” when it blatantly shoves real life in our faces? What does this mean about how we view fiction? Have we become gatekeepers of what we think should and should not be fictionalized?
These are open-ended questions, though I lean on the side of, yes, I think that to some extent, we begin to gate-keep what is fictionalized because most readers turn to fiction as a means of escapism. And lets make this distinction: Just because content in a book personally makes a reader uncomfortable or a reader decides that’s not the content they want to engage with, or a reader perceives something to be sensationalized or unrealistic, doesn’t mean that the content is sensationalized. There is also a distinction between what personally makes a reader uncomfortable and whether or not the content should be out there for people to choose to consume. I’m a big fan of, if you don’t want to read XYZ, the don’t read XYZ, but saying other people shouldn’t read something because of its content, makes no sense to me. Nothing in life is one size fits all… And not everyone reads fiction as a means of escapism. People will often turn to fiction to see how certain topics or historical events are portrayed and then fit it into broader themes and studies of specific time periods and topics.
This post was perhaps a bit of a ramble, but it’s something that I think about a lot. I personally, have a very high tolerance for this type of content. I personally had no visceral reaction to A Little Life - yes, there are sections of it that are graphic, but there is also so much other content in that book. People have focused so much on how shocked they were, that I often see them neglect everything else in the book.
Again, don’t get me wrong - not every book is for every person. I completely understand why many people don’t want to read this type of content. The more you read, the more you discover what you do and do not like to read.
What do you think about this? How do you feel about realistic trauma in fiction? Why do you think, when this type of content is in fiction and readers become hyper focused on it?
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