★ 03/01/2021
Novelist and critic Laing (Crudo ) places the life and legacy of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) at the center of this impassioned and provocative study of “the vexed relationship between bodies and freedom.” Laing highlights Reich’s development of body-based psychotherapy to help patients release their emotional pain, and his conflicts with Sigmund Freud, an early mentor, over the inhibition of sexual desire (Freud thought sex was “an unruly, dangerous force”; Reich believed it to be “the foundation of emotional health”). She also delves into Reich’s efforts to “fuse” psychotherapy and Marxism and his criminal prosecution for claiming that he could cure cancer by harnessing a tangible “life force” he called orgone. Along the way, Laing folds in reflections on her own experiences undergoing Reich’s bodywork therapy and her reaction, as the child of a “bona fide lesbian household,” to the passage of a 1988 law banning positive discussions of homosexuality in U.K. schools. Detours into the lives of Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Sontag, and Nina Simone illuminate the influence of Reich’s theories, which Laing boils down to two “durable truths”: human bodies carry personal and inherited trauma, and people are “porous and capable of mysterious effects on each other’s lives.” This lucid foray into some of life’s deepest questions astonishes. (May)
"A quintessential book for the precarious moment we’ve found ourselves in... [M]ultilayered and masterfully structured... Everybody should be required reading for anyone who cares about not just where we are now, but the future."
Washington Post - Michele Filgate
"Daring and complicated... The method of Everybody [is] framed as an extended conversation between the author and her sources, in which De Sade blurs into Reich, who blurs into Sontag, and back again. The key to all this movement is that it also invites us to participate in the conversation"
Los Angeles Times - David L. Ulin
"We are lucky to be living in the time of Olivia Laing... [T]o spend time with Laing as she works through a topic, finding the unlikeliest of connective ideas wherever she looks, is to come away with a view of the world that—if not exactly clearer—is strange and rich and profound."
Literary Hub - Jonny Diamond
"Reading Everybody felt like hanging out with my absolute smartest friend having, somehow, the precise conversation I need to have in this historical moment. Olivia Laing’s mind is a thrill to watch, and the connections she draws between the body, sex, art, and freedom made the world around me buzz with new depth and possibility, connections revealed and illuminated. Rare is the book that makes you feel more alive just in reading it, but Everybody does just that."
"A provocative inquiry into the body’s power and vulnerability, Everybody combines deep research, historical gossip, unsung queer lives, and deliciously readable prose. Laing reckons with her own gender and embodiment alongside major and minor theorists, artists, and activists, casting fresh light on the unending struggles for freedom and autonomy"
"Laing's finely crafted blend of incisive memoir and biography vitalize this unique chronicle of the endless struggle 'to be free of oppression based on the kind of body' one inhabits, a work of fresh and dynamic analysis and revelation."
Booklist (starred review)
"Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of twentieth century Euro-American radical thought…Brainy, open-hearted, and bold."
"A freewheeling and joyful exploration of the works and lives of a range of artists and thinkers who brought libidinal and creative energy together with spectacular results. Laing’s particular gift lies in her unique ability to line up unlikely juxtapositions—of artists, ideas, and works—and then draw clear and illuminating insights from such constellations. What her earlier work did for loneliness, this book does for liberation"
"A beautiful, strange and sprawling meditation on the relationship between the body and freedom."
New Statesman - Sophie McBain
★ 05/07/2021
Like Sonya Renee Taylor's The Body Is Not an Apology and other books that build on Audre Lorde's foundational ideas about embodiment and social justice, Laing's (The Lonely City ) new book reminds us of the ways in which our persistent attempts to detach ourselves from our bodies creates systems that exploit individuals based on their perceived value within economies that privilege narratives of white, cisgender, heterosexual success. Laing takes a theoretical and historical approach to bodily integrity that examines gay rights, sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement, all of which she anchors in her own situated knowledge and lived experiences. The author dedicates the book to "bodies in peril," from individuals impacted by the European migrant crisis of 2015, to everyone impacted by COVID-19. It's a statement that showcases the balance that runs throughout this book, with a recognition of how vulnerable we are, especially when our bodies belong to categories treated as disposable. VERDICT There are moments in this book that may feel too theoretical; yet, when Laing explores and expresses the ways in which our bodies are full of power, she offers a form of support we could all use more of as we navigate our own bodies and relearn what it means to value them. This is worthwhile, reflective reading.—Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI
★ 2021-03-31
Growing up in a lesbian household in the stridently homophobic Britain of the 1980s, novelist and cultural critic Laing, winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize, felt she was “not a girl at all, but something in between and as yet unnamed.” The sharp dissonance “between how I experienced myself and how I was assumed to be,” she writes, was like a “noose around my neck.” Reflecting on her fraught sense of embodiment, Laing creates a penetrating examination of the political and cultural meanings ascribed to bodies as well as the relationships of bodies to power and freedom. The body, writes the author, was central to cultural protests—gay rights, feminism, and civil rights—that essentially were struggles “to be free of oppression based on the kind of body you inhabited.” The controversial Austrian physician and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich serves as gadfly and guide as Laing thinks about the forces that shape and limit bodily freedom. In the early 1930s, Reich coined the term sexual revolution in order “to describe the universe of happiness and love that would arise once people had shaken off their shackles” of sexual repression, and he claimed to have discovered orgone, “the universal energy that animates all life.” With Reich as a touchstone, Laing investigates many artists and writers with particularly vexed connections to their bodies: Susan Sontag in her ferocious response to cancer; radical feminist Andrea Dworkin; Agnes Martin, who, like Reich, “wanted to connect people to a kind of universal love” but became undermined by paranoia; Ana Mendieta, whose art violently depicted rape; Allen Ginsberg; Malcolm X; and Nina Simone, whose music enacted a “cathartic passage through fury, mourning, horror, hurt, despair, and out again to joy.” Laing reveals in visceral detail society’s terror “of different kinds of bodies mixing too freely” and envisions a future in which that terror no longer exists.
Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring.
"[Laing] masterfully shares stories of fascinating artists and historical figures... Her net, in short, is breathtakingly, ambitiously wide... Everybody is a nonpareil study that delights the intellect."
"A fleet, gracious tour of bodily distress and joy…Laing writes in great looping sentences, both precise and evocative."
"Revelatory…Dreaming beyond conventional wisdom and restrictive visions, Laing emboldens us to seek liberation across difference in the face of turmoil. Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation."
Boston Globe - Lauren LeBlanc
"This is an astonishing project, written with equal parts stirring passion and capable intellect. Laing puts into words experiences I had never before seen in print, and the world is better for it. I love this book."
"Laing’s Everybody animates flesh with the incandescent force of histories both individual and collective. Through her incisive lens, the body—that knot of mind, matter, culture, and society that we dwell inescapably within—becomes almost impossibly fascinating."
