Hanya Yanagihara on To Paradise, Sydney Writers' Festival 2022

On Friday 20 May 2022, the City Recital Hall at Sydney’s Angel Place was buzzing. When acclaimed, much loved New York novelist Hanya Yanagihara finally appeared (not that she was late, we were early!), the crowd exploded.

Yanagihara and SBS journalist Anton Enus have been in conversation together before, so their talk was easy, cheeky, brilliant. First they complimented each other’s clothes: her black dress and sparkly silver slippers, his gold and red shirt. Enus reminded us that Yanagihara is not just the author of bestselling sensation A Little Life (2015) – and now To Paradise (2022) – but also has a big day job, as editor of T, the New York Times Style Magazine.

When Enus opened by asking Yanagihara about her choice to write such challenging novels, she calmly replied: Readers should be made to work.

It’s a great act of vulnerability, to open the book and go where the writer tells you. Yanagihara wants all her books to take you into the life of someone whose existence seems impossible.

It took her only eighteen months to write A Little Life, which is over 800 pages. Her focus must be laser sharp, formidable.

You should always ask an artist to take a big swing, she said. It should feel hard! When you’re writing anything or making any sort of art it has to feel urgent - and it has to feel like you’re the only one who can write it.

She said that although they’re very different, her two novels - A Little Life and To Paradise - are similar because they’re both about the emotional lives of people who don’t quite fit into society, don’t understand the terms of love - and they all experience shame. And both novels were written against history.

To Paradise takes the facts of American history and twists them.

The first part is a reframing, a retelling, of Henry James’s Washington Square. It’s about an imaginary America that was not founded on Puritanism. And if you take Puritanism out of America,’ she said, you immediately take out its ideas of love and gender, because they’re formed by Puritanism. But taking out Puritanism doesn’t take Americans’ attitude to race. Their racism remains without Puritanism.

All novels are about love. And all rest on money – and how much the woman does and doesn’t have, how much she has or can marry into.

Yanagihara takes gender out of marriage in her novels - which creates a completely different form of marriage.

Her books not only remake marriage, they also challenge the idea of parenthood. The way she sees it, parenthood is just an older person taking care of a younger person.

To Paradise is composed of three stories, largely concerned with the relationship between the United States and Hawaii. Yanagihara is a fourth generation Hawaiian resident, but she’s not of Hawaiian blood. Her ancestors came in the late 19th century. She’s the first generation not to work in the cannery or the field.

She said today you can walk down a street in Hawaii and hear Hawaiian spoken – which was not possible in her childhood.

To Paradise begins in 1893. This is intentional, because it was the year Hawaii’s last queen was overthrown and the Kingdom of Hawaii was annexed by America.

You could argue that every country is made up of outsiders, but some people have a platform on which to gain some semblance of power and some people don’t.

A garden – Yanagihara casually remarked as she threw a bomb (given the sacrosanct nature of gardens in these pandemic times) – is a place designed to keep people out.

And what of the uncanny timing of her new novel, which is about a pandemic but which she began before Covid?

Yanagihara said she spoke to a French epidemiologist who said a pandemic was due because America had spent too much money researching cancer, rather than pandemic viruses.

Asked how she managed to write novels as well as edit T, Yanagihara said T comes out eleven times a year, so it’s very predictable – and she’s very well organised.

With her novels, she doesn’t work on deadlines. She didn’t have a contract for this book. She writes at night. She doesn’t go out a lot, apart from to the theatre.

Whenever you’re procrastinating, you’re getting something done.

And she has no children. If you’re a creative person with a family, you have to be very jealous with your creative time.

The best way to write, she said, is to be in movement. I often say to young writers who haven’t asked – she was very droll, super dry – that all of the flotsam you have lying around in your head is all connected.

‘You have to be patient and let the king come to you’, she said, quoting an artist from the issue of T devoted to creative people, artists, designers, etc.

When asked why her books are so sad, she said: I’m ultimately a tragedian. Creators are ultimately tragedians – or not. You want to elicit strong reactions and I don’t have any problem being over the top.

Her writing method is to have a running word doc, where she writes little scraps. Then the structure is very clear to her and you fill in the gaps. I always know what the ending is, so if you know the beginning and the end, you can find your way home. There’s a lot of detours on the way.

Enus asks about the missing mothers.

There are no mothers in any of my books. There are no obvious explanations. I always think it would be better to have a psychologist sit down with you after you’ve finished and tell you about it. They’d be better than editors, who really aren’t helpful.

An audience member who identified as a queer man asked for her thoughts on the Own Voices movement (which champions the right of diverse authors to tell their own stories) because her novels voice queer men.

Throwing another bomb – or, insouciantly strolling into a minefield, armed with her formidable intellect and astonishing clarity, Yanagihara said: 

‘Writing about others is not only an artist’s right, but I would argue a writer’s responsibility.’

Adding that Tony Kushner – the author of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes  – is one of her artistic heroes.

What is the book she gives to everyone? The Remains of the Day. It’s a perfect book. The result of a real discipline, an economy of language, the little things, details. A book like that is very, very demanding and hard to write.

Yanagihara is currently in a fallow period where you sit around and wait. She’s waiting for her next book to announce itself to her.

When asked about her relationship with history, she says: The great thing about subverting history is you can make it up. Readers are ready to surrender, trust, go with you. So all you have to do is make a logical universe and let them know there will be some pay off.

Next up, a dazzling conversation with poets Maxine Beneba Clarke and Omar Musa, moderated by poet Evelyn Araluen. Stay tuned.