Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and travel writer of Hawaiian ancestry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
science writer
The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.
boiling dry eat either forms fresh home japan november return soy thin
I go to Japan every November on vacation, and the one thing I never return home without is yuba, which is the thin skin that forms atop boiling soy milk. You skim it off and either eat it fresh or dry it.
parts putting
So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.
writers written
I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
cuisine flavor ingenious love tastes vietnamese work
I love how Vietnamese cuisine always tastes like flowers, and how they had the ingenious idea of pairing that floral flavor with seafood: such a combination shouldn't work as well as it does.
editor eventually industry magazine
From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.com.
beauty fan herself pillows throw tribal weary
The beauty of a Moroccan riad is undeniable, but even the most die-hard fan may find herself growing a little weary of what can come to feel like a one-size-fits-all aesthetic: tilework, white Berber rugs, woolen tribal throw pillows in reds and ochers, cut-metal lanterns.
height politics
I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.
complicit viewer
Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault.
born moved
I was born in L.A., then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to New York, then we moved to Baltimore, then we moved to California, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to Texas, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to California. This was before I was 17.
cruel hard people society tough trying various work
Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough.
encounters generally generous meeting page people successful writer writers
I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person.
banking buy goods religious showcase unlike wealthy
Unlike Milan, Italy's banking capital, or Rome, its religious center, Florence was the place where the rich went to buy goods that would showcase how wealthy they were.
In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.