Yanagihara is more confident talking about her magazine editing than about her novelistic abilities. She writes at night, for long stretches when the words are flowing. She completed her new novel, “To Paradise”—which stages three radically different narratives, set in three centuries, at the same town house in Washington Square—during the pandemic. Like “A Little Life,” it exceeds seven hundred pages. After she has hit on a plot and a structure she sticks to them, as if revising risks collapse. As she put it, “Once I’ve poured the concrete, I don’t rebuild the foundation.” Despite the extraordinary success of her fiction career, she regards it as a “slightly shameful” sideline. Indeed, she knows almost no other novelists, because she isn’t comfortable among them. She said, “I find that, whether from a sort of evil-eye avoidance superstition, or from not feeling that I quite have the right to call myself a writer—I don’t know what this is about, really, but I feel that writer is not something that I am, it is something that I do. And it’s something that I do in private.”
— from “Hanya Yanagihara’s Audience of One,” The New Yorker