The Barnes & Noble Review
Orson Welles was probably not the first person to say, "We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone," but he did say it, and I believe he really meant it. I often think of the way Welles died, by himself, late at night, a typewriter balanced on his elephantine stomach, his toy poodle Kiki yapping away at his feet until he was discovered cold the next morning. Welles knew that all deaths are lonely — that the final moments require a shoring up of the self (and a tossing away of Rosebuds), that every human's last act is never communal, that the end is always a solo performance. Of course, the second part of Welles' quote, which is often lopped off for the sake of bumper-sticker brevity, is that "Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone." For Welles, the making of illusion was not the performance of a cheap trick but a dazzling part of being alive; he knew that art (in his case theater, radio, film) is an extremely potent form of collective fantasy that allows us all to forget for a moment how very alone each of us is in this world. Art — like love and friendship — allows us to forget for a moment that we are all separate minds trapped in separate bodies with no way to become anything else, that loneliness is a condition built into our anatomy.
It makes a certain sense, then, that Olivia Laing, in this study of loneliness, would gravitate toward artists as the best vehicles through which to understand her struggle with solitude. Art, she argues, is also her favorite illusion, her curative salve for an isolated heart. As she writes in The Lonely City, "There are so many things that art can't do . . . it can't bring the dead back to life, it can't mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change." But its compensations are formidable: "It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly."
Laing comes to The Lonely City with plenty of wounds, and she is prepared to excavate them. The book, which is part memoir, part history, part biography, and part open-ended questioning, uses as a throughline the thirty-something writer's states of mind as she travels from England to a summer in New York City, squatting in sweaty, stuffy rented apartments, trying to mend a broken heart. Laing is part of a new group of nonfiction writers who are not afraid to infuse their own experiences into works of reportage, delving into the archives of libraries and into their own memories, discovering — and delighting in — both the puzzlements and the revelations that lie beneath the surface. This kind of writing, in which the author grabs the reader's hand and leads him or her through a museum of contradictory ideas, has lately been made newly vital and fresh by writers like Maggie Nelson, Mary Ruefle, Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, Leslie Jamison, and now Laing. They've in particular electrified the way we look back at literature, wresting the control away established (and so often male) academic and publishing authorities and re- investing the literary essay with an appeal that's almost visceral.
As far as this genre goes, Laing is one of the leaders of the field, and her career has been an exciting one to watch. She began, in 2011, with To The River, a book in which she walks the length of the Ouse, the river where Virginia Woolf drowned herself, in an attempt to understand the writer's depression alongside her own. She continued with 2013's The Trip to Echo Spring, a biographical study of six alcoholic authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver); she mines these writers' lives to try to decipher the connection between addiction and the creative process, and in doing so confronts her own demons about drinking and family trauma.
The Lonely City is Laing's most accomplished work yet in this vein; in it, she focuses again on a group of main players (artists Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Henry Darger) but also enlists in support a diverse cast that includes Valerie Solanas, Zoe Leonard, Klaus Nomi, Josh Harris, Billie Holiday, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Laing's local barista. Laing dips in and out of these lives as she maps her own sense of isolation in New York City, not tying any character to any one part of the narrative, but allowing them to bubble up when they need to be heard. Each of her four main players gets his own chapter, in which Laing does a deep biographical dive on the artist's work and how he approached the theme of solitude, but these various personae are shades that haunt the entire work. She tells us that she often moved through New York feeling so invisibly alone that she felt like a ghost, and so started to think of other ghosts as suitable company. The dead, for Laing, are not so much historical figures as they are very vibrant modern companions, and she invokes them with an ease and familiarity of old friends. She allows Warhol to pop up in the chapter on the web, Hopper to pop up in a chapter on Warhol, and so on. In Laing's head, all of these artists are still alive somewhere — perhaps even in communion with one another. This thought makes her feel less alone, and she passes it along to us.
The Lonely City is a book about art as redemptive force, both because it saves us from feeling alone and also tackles the concept of loneliness in a way that most of us refuse to do in the course of our ordinary conversations. Laing opens up the work by admitting her feelings of shame about being lonely: "Loneliness is difficult to confess, difficult too to categorize . . . it is subject too to pathologization, to being considered a disease." She is interested in a kind of loneliness that is specific to major urban settings (primarily New York City, though one of her obsessions, Henry Darger, lived and worked in Chicago). Laing's fascination is the acute feeling of isolation one gets in big crowds, the specific experience of looking out, alone, over a sea of apartment buildings at glowing windows emanating an remote warmth. Urban loneliness may have its counterpart in America's wide open spaces — the melancholy cowboy riding out solo over an expansive range. But this type of solitude doesn't intrigue her — Laing is pulled in by the type of loneliness that hurts so much because it happens in the presence of others. She is interested in those who, like Warhol, whipped up crowds wherever they went, yet never felt like they had a true friend. She is interested in artists like Wojnarowicz — who had many lovers and was part of the gay art scene in Manhattan in the '70s before dying from AIDS — who suffer silently at the same time that they use their work to speak very loudly. Laing experiences loneliness of the big city as an inherent dichotomy: cities are where artists go to make work that brings us all together, but in doing so, they also commit to a deeply detached and misunderstood existence in a place that makes everyone feel anonymous. Laing believes that cities inherently breed lonesomeness, even as they also allow connections to bloom.
Laing may be at her best when she applies this thinking to the digital city — for her, the entire Internet is essentially New York; a groaning maw in which genius cultural outcasts are kept in emotional quarantine. She dives deep into the work of Web 1.0 entrepreneur Josh Harris, whose "Quiet: We Live in Public," project invited 100 artists to live together in a "virtual terrarium" in the late '90s, having their entire lives caught on film and broadcast out to the webcams. Harris's experiments were decried as excessive and shut down by NYPD; now, of course, it's a truism to say we are eager to live our entire lives online, freely offering up our photos, emails, data, and tweets for mass surveillance. Laing points out that the Internet has redefined loneliness, in that you no longer have to be Warhol to create a movement; you can start a Factory from your laptop. This means that our sense of disconnection has burrowed even deeper. Her own experience with it proved almost vertiginous: "The whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, for which I was surrendering all the pieces of my identity, every element except the physical carcass in which I was supposedly contained."
In nearly every chapter, Laing discovers some magnetic, neon lure to the past — even though the artists she focuses on may have been lonely in their own times, at least they felt the pain and terror of it, and it moved them to create. Even the '90s dot-com-boomers trapped in Harris's proto-reality TV bubble were able to feel the strangeness and danger of broadcasting their every movement. Now, she argues, the loneliest feeling is that lonely doesn't feel like anything at all. "There is a gentrification that is happening in cities," she writes. "And there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions, too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect."
What Laing, and other writers like her, want most now is for people to feel. She shares her own anguish and grief not just to illustrate loneliness, but to show how it can be felt all the way down to the bones. She mixes her own story with those of people in the past not as a gimmick but as a way of saying, "they felt this way, I feel this way, and I hope others feel this way too." Fighting against emotional gentrification, she wants to spin her own illusion; that though we are born alone, live alone, and die alone, someone else is out there, walking through city streets late at night, asking herself how to connect. As she writes, "Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is a collective; it is a city." Laing realizes that we are all stumbling around the same scary zip code of the mind, looking for a friend. The Lonely City offers readers the gift of an extended hand.
Rachel Syme is a writer and reporter living in New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, Matter, and elsewhere.
Reviewer: Rachel Syme
The New York Times Book Review - Ada Calhoun
This daring and seductive book—ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known—raises sophisticated questions about the experience of loneliness…The Lonely City, like Laing's previous books…takes an idiosyncratic approach, merging memoir, philosophy, travelogue and biography…Reading this book on a lonesome business trip, I found myself wondering if The Lonely City made the exact wrong or exact right companion for forlorn airport loitering and desolate continental breakfasting. I think both. Reading this book made me feel aloneness more acutely, but also exposed its value. As Laing describes finding consolation in the work of artists, so this book serves as both provocation and comfort, a secular prayer for those who are alone—meaning all of us.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
…Olivia Laing…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…Give Ms. Laing her due. She lashes this material together and finds resonances between the artists she scrutinizes and admires. Better, she makes their work resonate for us. Ms. Laing began writing this book, in part, because she increasingly felt like a woman in a Hopper painting. His canvases, she writes, replicate "one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near-unbearable exposure." 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."
Publishers Weekly
02/01/2016
The lonely city of the title is teeming with painters, filmmakers, writers, and thinkers. In her new book, Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring) creates a “map of loneliness,” tracking its often-paradoxical contours in her own life as a transplant to New York City and traces how loneliness can inspire creativity. The central figures of the book—Henry Darger, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz—were all “hyper-alert to the gulfs between people, to how it can feel to be islanded amid a crowd.” By focusing on four artists (others, like Billie Holiday, also make appearances), Laing’s writing becomes expansive, exploring their biographies, sharing art analysis, and weaving in observations from periods of desolation that was at times “cold as ice and clear as glass.” She invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the Internet (which turns her into an obsessed teenager, albeit one who calls the screen her “cathected silver lover”). For once, loneliness becomes a place worth lingering. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
"A beautiful meander of a book" —Hanya Yanagihara, The New Yorker
"An extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald's H Is for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf." —Maria Popova
"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,The New York Times
"This book serves as both provocation and comfort, a secular prayer for those who are alone—meaning all of us."—The New York Times Book Review
"One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction...compelling and original."—Harper's Bazaar
"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
“…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. ”—The Wall Street Journal
"Laing’s prose is elegant and concise, with a breath of Joan Didion.... In its interdisciplinary scope and mix of culture, theory, and memoir, The Lonely City brings to mind other nonfiction hits of recent years, books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts or Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams."—The Millions
“The Lonely City bristles with heart-piercing wisdom... It's a ghostly blueprint of urban loneliness — an emotion that Laing calls ‘a city in itself’—that reminds us how loneliness can sometimes bring us together.”—Jason Heller, NPR.org
“Laing’s meditation gradually gathers force into a manifesto, taking aim at the assumption of simple, unknowable 'mental illness' to explain the life and creative work of the outsider artist Henry Darger or of Solanas—or of Warhol, for that matte...Without glamorizing either loneliness or the urban decay of New York in the ’70s, The Lonely City builds an impassioned case for difficulty and difference, for social rebellion and the unpredictable artistic richness that can result."—The Washington Post
“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.”—The Boston Globe
"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
"Laing writes with a compassion and curiosity rarely seen in any genre...Although I read The Lonely City in the same urban spaces that usually impart a familiar loneliness—loud cafés, quiet apartments and slow trains choked with strangers—I felt different while reading it....Something surprising happened, something Laing most likely intended"—The Rumpus
"A singular, fiercely candid and rare book."—The Buffalo News
“[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
"Luminously wise and deeply compassionate, The Lonely City is a fierce and essential work. Laing is a masterful biographer, memoirist and critic. Fearlessly tracing the roots of loneliness, its forbidding consequences, and its complicated and beautiful relationship with art, it is powerful, poignant and magical. Reading it made my heart ache yet filled me with hope for the world."—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
"[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.”—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“[An] imaginative and poignant quest….Through her ardent research, empathetic response, original thought, courageous candor, and exquisite language, Laing joins the ever-growing pool of writers—among them Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hope Jahren, Jhumpa Lahiri, Leslie Jamison, Helen Macdonald, Sally Mann, Patti Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Edmund de Waal, and Terry Tempest Williams—who are transforming memoir into a daring and dynamic literary form of discovery that laces the stories of individuals into the continuum of humanity and the larger web of life on Earth to provocative and transforming effect.”—Booklist (starred review)
“By focusing on four artists…Laing’s writing becomes expansive, exploring their biographies, sharing art analysis, and weaving in observations from periods of desolation that was at times “cold as ice and clear as glass.” She invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the Internet (which turns her into an obsessed teenager, albeit one who calls the screen her 'cathected silver lover'). For once, loneliness becomes a place worth lingering.”—Publishers Weekly
"[An] absorbing melding of memoir, biography, art essay, and philosophical meditation...[An] illuminating, enriching book."—Kirkus Reviews
"A remarkable combination of personal mediation and psychological and artistic inquiry, The Lonely City is always superbly written, fascinating and often sharply moving. Ultimately the book has a paradoxical effect: at the same time as it makes one aware of one's own inescapable solitude, it leaves one feeling less alone."—Adam Foulds, author of In the Wolf's Mouth
“An extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf; a lyrical account of wading through a period of self-expatriation, both physical and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of loneliness.... The Lonely City is a layered and endlessly rewarding book, among the finest I have ever read.”
- Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Library Journal
10/15/2015
Laing opened her book career in 2014 with The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, which was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize and won front-page coverage in the New York Times Book Review. Her new book considers the concept of "aloneness" from the perspective of key artists, focusing on Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz and touching on luminaries from Alfred Hitchcock to Nan Goldin to Billie Holiday. Is this cool, or what?
Kirkus Reviews
2016-02-03
A British journalist and cultural critic investigates how loneliness shapes art. When she first came to Manhattan, in her 30s, Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, 2013, etc.) found her loneliness intensified by living in the city, surrounded by millions of people. Loneliness, writes the author in this absorbing melding of memoir, biography, art essay, and philosophical meditation, "doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired." Her own inability to connect was caused partly by her "anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable," and her discomfort with "the gender box to which I'd been assigned." Laing's mother had been a closeted gay woman until she was outed in the 1980s; her mother's partner was an alcoholic; and Laing grew up witnessing "chaotic and frightening scenes" and "coping with a simmering sense of fear and rage." The artists she features emerged from their own sources of pain, which fueled both a sense of isolation and a "hypervigilance for social threat," which causes the lonely person to grow increasingly "suspicious and withdrawn." Drawing on biographies, interviews, oral histories, and archival material, Laing sensitively explores the lives and works of artists such as Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, and Klaus Nomi. Hopper's urban scenes, writes Laing, evoke "the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near-unbearable exposure." Wojnarowicz's paintings, installations, photography, films, and performances focus "on how an individual can survive within an antagonistic society." Outsider artist Darger, a Chicago janitor, produced over 300 paintings, many disturbingly violent. His art "served as lightning rods for other people's fears and fantasies about isolation, its potentially pathological aspect." Although art may be generated by loneliness, writes Laing in this illuminating, enriching book, it has a significant "capacity to create intimacy."
