IIt’s been a decade since Olivia Laing published The Lonely City, a blend of memoir and cultural analysis on the isolation of urban life. Lange – who is non-binary – had moved to Manhattan after a love affair that ended abruptly. Once there, they were surprised by their feelings of loneliness. Laing observed that “You can be lonely anywhere, but loneliness has a special flavor that comes from living in a city surrounded by millions of people”.
The author’s efforts to understand these difficult emotions are threaded through a series of artist paintings examining the relationship between loneliness and creativity. There is Edward Hopper, famous for his paintings of lonely figures sitting in cafés and eateries, and Henry Darger, the janitor and hospital worker who lived alone and achieved posthumous fame through his disturbing and hallucinatory paintings of misfits. Laing also considers the work of Andy Warhol, who surrounded himself with people and distanced them from each other, and American artist and photographer David Wojnarowicz, who documented the devastation caused by the AIDS virus. His work, says Laing, “did more than anything to free me of the burden of the feeling that in my loneliness I was shamefully alone”.
Actor Tilda Swinton is the narrator for this new recording marking the book’s tenth anniversary. His reading (his first for audiobook) is intense but contemplative, full of curiosity and sadness. Laing, who now lives in Suffolk, reads a new article in which she explains that loneliness is “a part of being human: isolated in a body, doomed to live within time. No one is truly immune to loneliness and what really matters is what we do with it and where it takes us.”
Available through Canongate Books, 9 hours 36 minutes
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