A Little Life

Four college friends build their adult lives in New York across some thirty years, the story circling ever closer to Jude St Francis, a gifted litigator carrying a childhood of unspeakable harm. The map holds to Lower Manhattan: a first cramped apartment on Lispenard Street in TriBeCa, the SoHo loft on Greene Street that Jude and Willem come to share, the downtown courts and the square by NYU, with a weekend house upstate off to the north.

Jude St Francis

The Lispenard Street apartment

Part One

The four friends start out broke in a cramped, badly kept walk-up on Lispenard Street, the young men's first real home in the city and the setting for the early friendship between Jude and Willem. Yanagihara pins it to this short TriBeCa street between Church Street and Broadway.

Part One

inferred The novel names Lispenard Street in TriBeCa as the site of the first shared apartment, but not a verifiable building; this marks a mid-block point on the real street.

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