'To Paradise' Imagines a Century-Spanning, Alternate America

Goodreads: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got the idea for this book? And also, how is it similar or different from the other two novels that you published?

Hanya Yanagihara: I started thinking about the idea of paradise after the Muslim ban in early 2017, and this idea, specifically, of America as a paradise. [I wondered] had we been, in a way, mis-billing America all along? Really, what a paradise does is keep people out, not allow them in. This idea of America as a land that was open to all was perhaps flawed in its conception from the very beginning.
 
In terms of actually laying fingertips to keyboards, that really began in March of 2018. As I started writing it, various events in real time began colliding in interesting ways with the imagined worlds of the book, but it didn't fundamentally change what I was writing about. To some degree, it had nothing to do with the political climate, and to some degree, it did.
 
I would say what this has in common with A Little Life is there's a certain, sort of, a historicism. A Little Life was very divorced from time, and in this book, the worlds of the novel are divorced from actual history.
 
I also think one of the themes that runs through all of them, though, is shame. And how shame colors our lives and informs our decisions, not only as individuals but as nations and as cultures.

GR: And all three of the books in To Paradise take place in New York City but a century apart. How is New York City central to the novel?

HY: I think one thing that everyone shares about living in New York is, when you get here, everyone's always telling you you should have gotten here 30 years ago. I've lived here for a very long time, but it's not a city I particularly fetishize or, aside from the people in it, have a deep emotional attachment to.
 
But generation after generation—and this has been true for centuries—people have come, young people and not so young people, have come to New York to test their mettle. That is true of every person in this book, in a sense, who, whether born in New York or comes to New York, does so in order to escape something or to prove something. Which is I think why all people come to New York.
 
It is not a novel that could take place anywhere but New York, with its wealth and its disparities of wealth, and its promise of fortunes being made and its realities of fortunes being lost. The fact that it is an intersection, not just of cultures but of different ideologies. And you have a lot of people living in very close proximity. The natural divisions of space that you have in other American cities don't exist here.

GR: Other than location, what bridges these three books together?

HY: I think all of them are about what's popularly called the American experiment.
 
I think there's always a sense that we have in America—and especially perhaps now and in the past few years—that it could become something else any minute. That we might be living in an era in which we are watching this transformation from one kind of Democratic republic to another.
 
It's very scary for some people. It's very thrilling for others. And this is all up and down the political spectrum. I think that is something that all of us share—uncertainty about what America is becoming.
 
The other source of uncertainty we all share is what America was.
 
One of the central debates that we're having, again along the political spectrum, is if what we've learned about America is actually America—is it true? And for many people in this country, is this country a flawed country that can be fixed within the systems that exist, or is this country a country that's so flawed to its very foundation that there's nothing to do but start again?

Those are really the questions that animate this book and that animate each section.

I think another question running throughout these books is this idea of sacrifice. How far will people go to protect the people they love and what justifications they’ll make for it, and if by protecting someone are they sacrificing someone else?

GR: In terms of the structure, why use three stories told 100 years apart? Was there any significance to the year ’93?

HY: I always imagined it that way, divided by a few sets of centuries, so it's 1893 to 1993 and 2093.

The 1893 date was specific. It was the year that Hawaii was annexed, and sort of the high point of America's colonial imperial adventures. And it is also a fin de siècle novel, so an end-of-the-century novel, which is a 19th-century conceit in novels, and it always implies a certain uneasiness about the century coming to an end.

And there is this sense running through, I hope, the books in each of these three sections, a kind of existential and cultural uneasiness about where the country and where the world are going to go in the next century.

GR: Do you have a favorite, or was one easier to write? From reading about your process, it seems that you write pretty quickly.

HY: They were all enjoyable to write, and I liked spending time in all of the worlds.
 
Charlie’s voice was the easiest in certain ways, and Kawika’s father, Wika. It is very enjoyable to imagine a dystopic future, but it was also enjoyable to imagine the past. The 1993 section is a world that I arrived a little bit too late to experience, but was close, so that felt very natural as well.
 
In the 2093 world, in particular, I wanted to convey that even though the government is truly totalitarian, there is still life being lived. There are still people falling in love and there are still people enjoying themselves and playing sports, and life, even under an oppressive regime, is still being lived. That was important to remind people of as well.

GR: You mentioned a little bit about the title of the book. Did you consider any others?

HY: I had a sense of how each book would end, and [the third] would end with those words: “to paradise.” So I knew that was the title.

GR: Are any of the characters based on people from your life?

HY: No. I think all characters in all books are always the author.

GR: I'm also curious about the cover art that you used. You've used Peter Hujar for your last two. Why did you go in a different direction for this one?

HY: It was important to me to have a Hawaiian person on the cover, and I wanted something that felt, again, pretty timeless. I do think that Peter Hujar’s work, as beautiful and as timeless as it is, is clearly contemporary.

I wanted an image that was old that felt very modern, and I think we got that in the Hubert Voss painting of this boy. It’s a very old-fashioned novel in a lot of ways, with a lot of old-fashioned literary conceits. I wanted a cover that was equally resistant to trends.

GR: You started writing a pandemic novel pre-pandemic. How or did COVID and the time that we're just coming through influence the story?

HY: Very little. By the time we all got sent home and I left my office—I think it was March 8, 2020—I was pretty deep into the book. I had it plotted out, I knew what it was going to be.
 
The big thing that changed and just evolved as I started writing was climate.
 
Originally, book three was going to be set in the post-, kind of a nuclear, winter world in which everything got so hot and bubbled over and then was finally frozen over. But it wasn't soon enough to happen, so it actually is set in the beginning of the middle of the great warming.

GR: That is interesting. Do you have a particular writing process?

HY: Well, I have a job.… I write at night is the short answer, but I don't write every night. I sometimes don't write for a couple weeks, and I don't worry about it if I don't.
 
I think many creative people struggled during the darkest days of the pandemic with the fact that they weren't producing anything. I thought people were being very hard on themselves.
 
For those of us who were lucky enough to be midstream in a project, it was a salvation. It was something where, at this point, the world of the book was so established that it was an escape from what was happening outside. And nor did I need to do that much creative generation by that point because it was already so far along.

GR: It is incredibly impressive that you can write these books and also juggle working for The New York Times. [Yanagihara is editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.]

HY: It's a very different skill. Once you become the editor in chief, you do top editing, but your work is far less, in a sense, text-based. You're not using the same muscle, and it's a collaborative process—not something where you get to do exactly what you want.
 
When you're writing a book, it is a) purely creative, and b) purely your own. There are no deadlines. You take as long or as little as you need to finish. You don't have to worry about length. You never have an editor saying, “Well, I need you to lose 500 words.”
 
It is pure indulgence.

GR: How did you do your research for this book?

HY: This book, the only real research I did was to go visit some scientists at Rockefeller University in Manhattan. We have a family friend who introduced me to a virologist and also to a few postgraduates working there, and to a doctor at the EcoHealth Alliance, which focuses on zoonosis—the diseases that leap from animals into humans.
 
I did a series of interviews with five of them—those four at Rockefeller and EcoHealth during the early part of 2017. But after that, I didn't do anything else.
 
At the end of the book, I had this family friend read through part three just to do a plausibility read. I told him, “It doesn't have to be likely; it just has to be scientifically plausible.”

GR: Did any books influence or inform To Paradise?

HY: I think it's in conversation with Henry James' Washington Square, obviously, and also Specimen Days, to a certain extent, by Michael Cunningham. I was telling Michael Cunningham this and I said, “You probably won't be able to sense it yourself,” and I don't think he did. I don't think it's a clear kind of conversation, but was to me.
 
Angels in America by Tony Kushner and then, to a certain extent, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Never Let Me Go by [Kazuo] Ishiguro and The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing.

GR: We mentioned A Little Life earlier, and I'm just wondering what you think about the impact that book has had and its longevity, particularly on social media like TikTok and #BookTok?

HY: I was going through and recently looking up some of the emails from my editor on A Little Life, and the gloomy predictions on its fate. I don’t think anyone expected it to find the audience it did.
 
I did think it would find an audience. I knew it would find, what I imagined would be, a very small and very passionate group of people who would feel, as I did, that it was a book that answers things that they didn't even know how to articulate. That it would feel like a book of their lives. What I didn't expect, and I don't think anyone expected, was that there would be many more people than just a small group.
 
I used to work in book publishing many, many years ago, and I know how rare it is to have a book that truly takes flight because of readers recommending it to other readers, and booksellers recommending it to customers. It is very rare; there's nothing you can really do to force that. You just get lucky. And I got very, very lucky.
 
The fact that it has found a home and has resonated with so many people is the honor of my life. It's the honor every writer dreams of, but there is nothing that I could have done to make it happen.
 
I think publishing houses are very good at speaking to the people in America who regularly read literary fiction, who are reading reviews, or are in the bookasphere in some way. Whom they don't know how to speak to are the potentially millions of other readers who perhaps live in a city without an independent bookstore, or feel shut out from what they feel is an elitist, literary culture, and who don't know how to find those books.
 
To see the book embraced and found by those readers—by the readers whom book publishing does not directly market to—has been deeply gratifying. It's been humbling, and it's been a lesson that readers are all over, it's just that they may not be participating in the very small society of fully engaged book insiders.
 
To see it on a place like TikTok and to see that people have made their own kinds of literary societies, as it were, is pretty revolutionary. That did not exist when I was in book publishing and is purely, I think, one of the beneficial side effects of social media.

GR: What books are you reading now?

HY: I just got this galley called The Premonition’s Bureau by a New Yorker writer named Sam Knight. It's about this woman in London who in the ’60s was struck by this premonition that there was about to be a disaster. Shortly after—about an hour later—a coal mine collapsed. It’s a study of how some people are actually imbued with a predictive gift, and is there any kind of science behind that?

GR: Final question: What more should readers know about your work or To Paradise?

HY: I think a reader is always surrendering to a book whenever they open the page. I'm very grateful that readers have surrendered to my other books, and I hope they're able to do so for this one as well.