The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Olivia Laing, 2016
Picador
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250039576
Summary
A dazzling work of memoir, biography and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of six iconic artists.
What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens?
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art.
Moving fluidly between works and lives - from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism - Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone.
Humane, provocative and deeply moving, The Lonely City is about the spaces between people and the things that draw them together, about sexuality, mortality and the magical possibilities of art. It's a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Olivia Laing, born in 1977, is a British writer, author, and critic.
Her first book, To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, was published in 2011. It was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and named a Book of the Year by a number of British papers: Independent, Evening Standard, Financial Times, and Scotsman. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, her second book, came out in 2013, and her third, The Lonely City: Adventures in Being Alone was released in 2016. The latter books have both been widely praised.
Laing has served as the deputy books editor of the Observer and also writes for the Guardian, New Statesman, and Granta, among other publications.
She has been a MacDowell and Yaddo Fellow and Writer in Residence at the British Library. She lives in Cambridge, England. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Olivia Laing, in her new book, The Lonely City, picks up the topic of painful urban isolation and sets it down in many smart and oddly consoling places. She makes the topic her own.... Perhaps the best praise I can give this book is to concur with Ms. Laing’s dedication: "If you’re lonely, this one’s for you."
Dwight Garner - New York Times
This book serves as both provocation and comfort, a secular prayer for those who are alone―meaning all of us.
Ada Calhoun - New York Times Book Review
[Laing] is a brave writer whose books, in their different ways, open up fundamental questions about life and art…. What’s startling is that her book succeeds in offering its readers a redemptive experience comparable to the one she’s describing. Reading it at a lonely moment, I found that I responded easily to the confident muscularity of her prose and the intimate way she described emotional states. I became swiftly less lonely as I did so, earthed by the company of Wojnarowicz, Warhol and Laing herself….This triumphant book is in part an appeal for us to value the kind of loneliness that can be rendered, by the intimacy of art, both tolerable and shareable.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
[A] lovely thing. Exceptionally skillful at changing gears, Ms. Laing moves fluently between memoir, biography (not just of her principal cast but of a large supporting one), art criticism and the fruits of her immersion in "loneliness studies."... She writes about Darger and the rest with insight and empathy and about herself with a refreshing lack of exhibitionism.…every page of The Lonely City exudes a disarming, deep-down fondness for humanity.
Wall Street Journal
Laing, who used group biography to examine the connections between alcoholism and literature in The Trip to Echo Spring, here performs an almost magical trick: Reminding us of how it feels to be lonely, this book gently affirms our connectedness.
Boston Globe
An uncommonly observant hybrid of memoir, history and cultural criticism... [A] book of extraordinary compassion and insight.
San Francisco Chronicle
Laing is an astute and consistently surprising culture critic who deeply identifies with her subjects' vulnerabilities... absolutely one of a kind.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR's Fresh Air
It's not easy to pull off switching between criticism and confession―and like Echo Spring, The Lonely City is an impressive and beguiling combination of autobiography and biography, a balancing act that Laing effortlessly performs. Her gift as a critic is her ability to imaginatively sympathize with her subject in a way that allows the art and life of the artist to go on radiating meaning after the book is closed.
Elle
One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction...compelling and original.
Harper's Bazaar
Laing is always circling back toward a piercingly relevant observation. And, oh, those observations! ... Laing is a great critic, not least because she understands that art can and often does manifest multiple conflicting meanings and desires at once.
Laura Miller - Slate
[An] acute, nervy and personal investigation into urban solitude….[Laing] writes with lyrical clarity, empathy, and a knack for taking a wandering, edgy path, stretching themes (and genres), while never losing an underlying urgency…. A group biography all in one, which takes a difficult, almost taboo, subject and deftly turns it over anew.
New Statesman
By focusing on four artists…Laing’s writing becomes expansive, exploring their biographies, sharing art analysis, and weaving in observations.... She invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the Internet.... For once, loneliness becomes a place worth lingering.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [An] imaginative and poignant quest….Through her ardent research, empathetic response, original thought, courageous candor, and exquisite language, Laing [is one of the authors] transforming memoir into a daring and dynamic literary form of discovery.
Booklist
[An] absorbing melding of memoir, biography, art essay, and philosophical meditation...[An] illuminating, enriching book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Lonely City...then take off on your own:
1. Olivia Laing writes of loneliness in a large city—New York, specifically—and after a relationship break-up. If you don't live in a metropolitan area, however, does this book resonate with you? Is the urban loneliness that Laing dissects in her book different than loneliness felt elsewhere...or under different conditions?
2. Laing talks about loneliness in these terms:
What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.
What do you make of this particular passage? In reading it—or others in the book—were you consoled to think that others have a deep sense of isolation, that you are not alone in your loneliness? In other words, did you become less lonely reading this book?
3. Laing writes about feelings common to loneliness: that we're unattractive or sexually undesirable. Is that a cause or an effect of loneliness?
4. Talk about your own loneliness and isolation—the times when you felt cut off, ashamed. Were there (are there) specific times or events in your life that have brought on loneliness?
5. What is Laing's take regarding our online lives? How does the internet contribute to a sense of isolation? Do you agree?
6. Talk about the four artists Laing researches, considering them one by one. Discuss how their work is bound up with the concept of loneliness—or in providing the author insights into her own. Which artist biographies do you find most interesting? Were Laing's choice of artists apt...or does she force fit her subjects to the topic at hand?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)