The cover becomes instantly iconic (in the least hyperbolic sense of that word). Surely! As if to say: this is the way it is now it’s Moshfegh’s world, we’re just etc. Writes HelloGiggles: by now, you’ve surely heard the hype. Unofficial book of the year, says Jezebel. Ottessa Moshfegh releases My Year of Rest and Relaxation to an eddy of fanfare in 2018. But nobody will, because they haven’t read it either. Someone could ask you a single question about it and the whole house of cards would come down. Ursula Robinson-Shaw in Sydney Review of Books: Every day I open Instagram and think, it is so brave of you to post a picture of that book you haven’t read. I react with a love heart and learn later, for the first time, on Google, that these are the names of Yanagihara’s tortured quartet of characters. Someone replies to my story, wait, look at this, and links a photo of the man I recognise as the chef from Queer Eye who only knows how to make guacamole wearing a t-shirt that reads Jude & JB & Willem & Malcolm. We are signalling into the void and the void is signalling back. What matters is that, like telepathy, we are brainwaving our own curated tastes, A Little Life little more than a semaphore in this parade of intellect. ![]() It doesn’t matter that at least one and potentially both of us are lying about having made it through 814 pages of increasingly agonising death, despair, anguish. ha ha, ha ha, we type to each other, faces locked in stony, unspoken comprehension that the other, too, must have read this seminal work of it-lit, the same one that Dua Lipa has definitely not read. I share the photo with friends and acquaintances indiscriminately. Unlike Dua Lipa, I do not necessarily look glamorous while doing so (though not for lack of trying). ![]() I am not making a moral judgement on Dua Lipa’s literary propensities-the act of reading alone carries no intrinsic virtue-but merely stating a fact. One thing she is not thinking about is queer misery, because she is definitely not reading A Little Life. I wonder what Dua Lipa is thinking about. ![]() On its spine, the title: A Little Life / Hanya Yanagihara. Dua Lipa is practising sun safety, shielding herself from harsh rays with a tome the size of a skull, spine turned towards the camera, eyes turned away as if caught unawares. The kind which makes you sneeze when you step into its crisp glare, which makes people say to each other with tight-lipped smiles, oh, aren’t we so lucky, finally, blue skies, I can’t believe how bad this weather has been lately. The kind which inevitably invokes a chill even though it’s 28 degrees and cloudless. Dua Lipa is lying, supine, in a tricolour bikini, basking in noonday sun.
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