Regardless of whether you’ve read Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life, chances are you’ve heard of it. It’s been promoted as “an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance”, and it’s become notorious for testing many a reader’s endurance.
Many, myself included, have described it as one of the most traumatic books they’ve ever read.
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to read a mind: to access a person’s unfiltered consciousness, to compare it to my own. I imagine the experience would be a bit like reading character-driven fiction, and a lot like reading Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport.
Ducks, Newburyport is a novel based on a stream of consciousness that runs without ceasing for more than a thousand pages. The stream contains no pauses,
