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.)