Let’s get this out of the way: A Little Life is not for the faint of heart. It’s a 700-page emotional sucker punch, and it doesn’t let you look away. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. If you haven’t—and you’re thinking about it—buckle up. There’s beauty in there, but you’ve got to walk through hell to find it.
The character of Jude is the kind of person you carry with you long after the last page. His life is defined by relentless trauma: an abusive monastery, child sex trafficking, chronic pain, and later, an abusive adult relationship. No matter how much love surrounds him, Jude is stuck in survival mode. He doesn’t know how to trust it, can’t let it in. His brain—and body—have been trained to expect pain.
And here’s where the book stopped being fiction for me.
My partner and I adopted three kids out of foster care. Before they came to us, they’d spent most of their lives in an abusive home, then five years bouncing between six different foster homes—and one short return to their biological mom that didn’t last. The trauma was baked in long before we were ever in the picture. And like Jude, they carry it in ways that don’t always make sense.
Take my oldest. She still hoards food in her room. Snacks, leftovers, granola bars hidden in drawers, rotting banana peels. She’s lived with us for three years. We’ve never missed a meal. But she lived too long without knowing where her next one would come from, and that fear doesn’t vanish just because someone tells her she’s safe now.
Or my youngest. She’s almost ten, but when something doesn’t go her way—when her needs aren’t met exactly how she thinks they should be—she melts down like a four-year-old. And that’s not bad behavior. That’s trauma. That’s her brain still trying to make sense of a world that wasn’t safe for way too long and unmet needs that may have felt like the end of the world.
Here’s another layer: I’m the only neurotypical person in my house. That means the way my brain works—the way I process emotion, problem-solve, and communicate—often doesn’t match my kids’. Early on, I learned that reacting the way I would in a stressful moment almost always made things worse. I’ve had to retrain myself to meet my kids where they are, even if it feels foreign or unnatural to me. I’ve had to teach in ways that don’t connect for me, but might connect for them. It’s a constant exercise in patience, creativity, and humility.
Reading about Jude helped me see this more clearly. His trauma wasn’t just in what happened to him—it was in how he responded to love, to comfort, to safety. He couldn’t trust it. And as a dad, that’s the hardest part: watching your kids try to unlearn the idea that love is temporary or conditional.
Spoiler warning here—seriously, stop reading if you haven’t finished the book.
Jude dies by suicide. It’s gutting, but it doesn’t feel like a twist. It feels like the tragic endpoint of someone whose trauma went too long unhealed. And while my kids’ stories are different—thank God—they’ve shown me how early trauma rewires everything: the way you think, the way you react, the way you love.
This book forced me to face something that’s easy to ignore if you’re not looking for it: healing isn’t about time per se. It’s about safety. It’s about repetition. It’s about proving, over and over again, that the world can be different. That love can stay.
I’m not a therapist. I’m just a dad trying to show up every day. But I know that trauma doesn’t just “go away.” You can’t discipline it out. You can’t love it out in one big grand gesture. It takes time. Years. Maybe a lifetime.
But I also know this: the work matters. The showing up matters. And the love—especially when it’s hard—matters most of all.
Drifting with Dalton 
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