Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and travel writer of Hawaiian ancestry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
characters colorful gods hang image japan japanese side stand temple
Go to any Shinto temple in Japan and you'll see it: a simple stand from which hang hundreds of wooden postcard-size plaques with a colorful image on one side and, on the other, densely scribbled Japanese characters in black felt-tip pen, pleas to the gods for help or succor.
change great interested primary relationships
I was interested about how relationships change as you get older. You are great friends in your 20s. In your 30s, you get married. Your 40s are all about your kids. In your 50s, you get divorced, and your friendships become primary again.
ensure flights quick schedule
Sometimes, of course, there's no quick way to make it through immigration: Different airports have gluts of incoming flights at different times of day, and short of rearranging your flight schedule to ensure you'll land at a low-traffic hour, there's nothing you can do.
cell join officer open papers passport pay phone photo queue tells
Once you join the queue for the immigration line, pay attention to what the expeditor tells you. Have your papers ready. Don't have your cell phone out. Take off your hat. Open your passport to the page with your photo and present it to the immigration officer already open.
anyone lower outside tons tourists
I live in Soho in lower New York; there's tons and tons of tourists right outside my door step, obviously. Most of them are European, and all of them have guidebooks. I never see anyone looking at a phone.
advances job work writers
I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.
chosen gone hear include intimate reported tone
There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't.
although both fond oddly optimistic raised
Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969.
admire funny unreliable
One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.
control countries encounter fascinated traveler watching
One of the things I'm fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them.
above forty highways limit miles mother per speed
The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty.
goat indigenous lofty northern specific term type woven
The term 'pashmina' is often used interchangeably with 'cashmere,' but in reality, pashmina is a specific type of very fine, lofty cashmere, woven from a specific type of goat - one indigenous to northern India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and harvested and woven there as well.
doctor early field health national research work
My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned.
fever life properly second unable wrote
I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.