In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the American belief in personal growth and healing through literature.
Hanya Yanagihara highlights the profound themes often present in American novels, specifically the journey of redemption alongside an essential focus on personal growth and healing. This reflects a broader cultural narrative in America that values self-improvement and the aspiration to 'get better' in life, suggesting that literature can be a powerful catalyst for such transformations.
In practice
A book club discussion on the themes of personal growth in modern American literature.
It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
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