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.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."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.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.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 Barnes & Noble Review
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 Book Review - Ada Calhoun
…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."
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
02/01/2016
10/15/2015
2016-02-03
"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 PopovaThe 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 The New York Times Book Review Harper's Bazaar San Francisco Chronicle Fresh Air 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 The Lonely City exudes a disarming, deep-down fondness for humanity. ”—The Wall Street Journal 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.orgThe Lonely City builds an impassioned case for difficulty and difference, for social rebellion and the unpredictable artistic richness that can result."—The Washington Post 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 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 New Statesman 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)Booklist (starred review)Publishers Weekly Kirkus Reviews In the Wolf's Mouth 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
