Writer: Hanya Yanagihara

Why have I never heard of Hanya Yanagihara? The Guardian published along article/interview Hanya Yanagihara: ‘I have the right to write about whatever I want’. Of course, that quote caught my eye.

The whole quote feels a bit of a manifesto:

How did Yanagihara herself feel about inspiring such strong feelings? “I don’t read anything about my books and I’m not on Twitter, which is, as I understand it, where the majority of these conversations tend to get slugged out,” she says. She is particularly impatient with the #ownvoice movement, which might question her right, as a woman, to tell the stories of gay men. “It’s very dangerous. I have the right to write about whatever I want. The only thing a reader can judge is whether I have done so well or not.”

Would that I could do this.

Years ago I thought that the Great American Novel would not be written by a white male. Could be this writer might be the one I was talking about.

For Yanagihara this play with naming represents one of many negotiations with America’s idea of itself. “We’re often renaming things in the United States, either to eradicate a bad memory or to try to dissociate it from a person who history has not treated kindly or who deserves to be treated with more respect. There’s this idea that naming something changes the fundamental nature of it, but does naming who we are make us more real to others? Or is it simply a way of making ourselves more real to ourselves?"

***

After three novels, her project is becoming clear: as Edmund White puts it, she is chronicling her country just as panoramically as Tolstoy did his, with a similar confidence that the story is interesting. “I’ve really thought about how young America is as a nation,” says Yanagihara. “Despite the frustration and despair – even in countries like France, which pretend they don’t care about it – there is such an admiration for America. It’s our vitality, our childlike qualities, you know – our optimism and generosity, but also our spoiltness, our tantrum-throwing, our inwardness, our myopia. I really do think of it as a precocious and quite bratty child, heading into adolescence: every quality that you would admire in that child and every quality that will frustrate you exists within America as well.”

Turns out Ball State's Bracken Library has her two, already published novels. She goes on my list to read this year.

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 1/9/22