“You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others.”
“Not so long ago, I spent a period in New York City, that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Though it wasn’t by any means a comfortable experience, I began to wonder if Woolf wasn’t right, if there wasn’t more to the experience than meets the eye – if, in fact, it didn’t drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive...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, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?”
In this brilliant analysis of what it is to be lonely in an urban environment, Olivia Laing draws on examples from art and culture as diverse as Henry Darger, internet entrepreneur Josh Harris, Edward Hopper, Zoe Leonard, Klaus Nomi, Andy Warhol (and Valerie Solanas, who shot him) and David Wojnarowicz. Her sensitive biographies of these figures – one per chapter – bring out the prominence of loneliness in each of their lives. She observes how, in many cases, that loneliness served as a guiding principle in their work. Also factored in at various points are Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and singers Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys) and Billie Holiday.
This isn’t a dry academic exercise, although Laing does bring an academic’s rigour to her analysis. It’s a deeply personal work. She’s not afraid to expose her own vulnerability and to talk about the “shame” she associates with being alone. You are left in no doubt that she understands how it feels: “It feels like being hungry: 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. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”
There’s a compassionate section on the impact of AIDS on 1980s America and how poorly it was understood at first. The isolating effects of the internet and social media in more recent decades are also considered. I found the book most interesting when the author wrote about her own life, and would have welcome even more of that. Her experiences of using Twitter – and how it both connected and distanced her from others – will strike a chord with anyone who checks their phone a little too often.
I particularly like the ways she weaves together apparently incongruous threads, with the subject of one chapter naturally popping up again in another with a satisfying sense of connectivity. It’s a fluid construction, with the book flitting effortlessly between genres: art criticism, autobiography, biography and psychogeography. At its heart is a deep empathy for anyone who has ever felt alone.
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