“Darling Jude”: On A Little Life, Matt Bomer’s Voice, and the Kind of Love That Wrecks You

There are books that stay with you, and then there are books that break you apart, chapter by chapter. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is the both—and then some. I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much over a piece of writing. It quite it literally destroyed me. It didn’t help that I listened to the audiobook, narrated with haunting restraint by Matt Bomer. It took several weeks—though at times, I had to pause it for days, letting the story settle before I could return.

Darling Jude. There’s no other way to start. Because once you meet Jude St. Francis, you never really un-know him. He is the centre of this vast emotional universe: brilliant, broken, beloved. A man carrying unspeakable trauma and yet somehow moving through the world with such quiet dignity it almost hurts to look at him. His pain is relentless. His survival, miraculous. His story is one of the most brutally tender things I’ve ever experienced.

But for all its horror, A Little Life is also a love story. One that builds slowly, gently—then all at once. A love story not about romance in the traditional sense, but about devotion. About friendship. About choosing someone. Again and again. Even when it’s hard. Even when they don’t believe they deserve it. It’s about Jude and Willem.

Their love is profound. It is a love that grows over years, quietly and without demand. Willem, the steady presence. The college roommate. The best friend. The love of his life. The one who sees Jude, all of him—his pain, his scars, his silence, his past—and stays. Not to fix him, but to love him anyway. That Jude, after everything, could finally have peace. That Willem could be his shelter.

But this book does not deal in wish fulfilment. It’s cruel in its brutality. And it shattered me. It left me gutted and sobbing. And when the moment comes—and if you’ve read it, you know—you can’t prepare. You should’ve seen it coming. You should’ve known.

The thing is, I had hoped they would live forever. I needed them to. After everything Jude had endured, I believed—naively, maybe—that love could be enough. That Willem would be enough. That friendship and devotion and the sheer force of care might be enough to save someone from themselves. But it wasn’t.

I mourned Willem like someone I had known. I mourned him for myself, but more than that, I mourned him for Jude—for what he represented, for what he gave. I grieved the life they were building and the slow, sacred rhythm of shared days. The kind of quiet domesticity that, for two people like them, felt radical. It wasn’t just the loss of a character—it was the collapse of an entire imagined future. A love that could have lasted. A life that should have been lived. Together.

And then I mourned Jude. Not in a single moment, I realised, but in waves—chapter after chapter after chapter. I mourned the boy he was and the man he never got to become without pain as his shadow. I mourned that even with all the love in the world, it wasn’t enough to convince him he was worthy of it. I mourned that his life, so full of intellect and beauty and quiet strength, had been spent surviving instead of living.

Matt Bomer’s narration only deepened that wound. His voice is soft, deliberate, almost reverent. He doesn’t dramatise. He just reads—clearly, cleanly—and somehow that’s worse. Or better. Or both. There were moments I had to stop walking, stop moving, just to cry in stillness. There is something unbearable in hearing pain spoken out loud in such a calm, familiar tone. It’s like being held while you’re breaking.

It’s not a kind book. It offers no tidy resolutions. It is, at times, brutal. Graphic. Relentless. And yet, amidst the horror, it gives us glimpses of something extraordinary: of grace, of unconditional friendship, of chosen family, and of a kind of devotion between men that feels rare and holy. And it gives us the belief, even within all the despair, that love matters. That it counts.

If you decide to read or listen to A Little Life, please do so with care. It asks everything of you—your time, your heart, your belief in goodness—and it doesn’t give easy answers in return. But it does give you Jude. It gives you Willem. It gives you Jude and Willem. And it gives you the ache of knowing what it means to choose someone, and to be chosen, even when it’s impossibly hard.