Why did I decide to read a book that covers grief and pain so deeply, having just suffered a personal loss myself? I guess there is something to be said for reading about other people’s pain when you’re drowning in your own. It makes you feel less alone.
In his book, A Heart That Works, the actor Rob Delaney talks about how reading Joan Didion’s book, A Year of Magical Thinking, made him feel less alone after his losing his two-year-old son to brain cancer. ‘I’ve been sober for twenty years but the sensation that book gave me was analogous to three beers and a bong hit,’ he wrote.
Delaney also talks about going to see Ari Aster’s movie Hereditary, a film seeped in ritualistic murder and misery, with other grieving parents, not long after his son died, as a way to process his pain. He talks about how they laughed out loud throughout the movie, garnering shocked and disgusted looks from others in the cinema.
I certainly didn’t find myself laughing at Jude’s misery, but I did find pockets of joy hope and love in many parts of his story.
The moments in A Little Life where I felt my heart was literally going to self-combust with love were when Harold adopted Jude; all of Willem and Jude’s love story (‘the happy years’); the unwavering loyalty and love of Jude’s friends and family; when Andy’s wife says she wouldn’t have married Andy had it not been for his relationship with Jude; Jude’s letter to Julia and Harold; Jude making the food everyone loves and Jude helping Willem learn the Christmas Song. While love may not have been enough to save Jude, at least he got a chance to be in love and feel loved.
In many ways, Harold, Julie and Willem were the family Jude never had. Friends who become family can be a lifeline. Living so far away from my own family when living in Fiji, I leant on friends massively for support after my husband died suddenly of a heart attack, five years ago. I was adjusting to life as a single mother, muddling through my own grief and my son’s. The bonds I have built with my ‘Fiji family’ are for life and cannot be understated.
Regardless of where you sit with this book, you’d be hard pressed not to feel deeply affected by it, whether you loved or loathed it. Big, difficult life themes are covered in A Little Life; pain, grief, loss, friendship and love, issues that bind us as humans and are interwoven into our lives whether we’re seeking it or not. It’s sad. It’s messy. But it’s also life.
A Little Life has affected me in ways no other book has ever done before. Not everyone will love it, of course, and many will hate it, but I will always be a die-hard fan, willing to offer up my copy up to anyone who feels ready, emotionally, to hold Jude’s hand from afar.