The Lonely City

"How to break free of that prison and reinhabit the space of trust and love is what Olivia Laing explores in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone — 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 as “a populated place: a city in…"

"When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her 30s, she found herself, unexpectedly, very lonely: “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,” she writes. Her meditation on loneliness and the artists who have inhabited it (Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz and others) is a stunning marriage of empathy and intellect. The chapter on the deep loneliness of the AIDS crisis brought me to tears on the underground."

"An advance copy of "The Lonely City," a remarkable examination of isolation and art by the writer and critic Olivia Laing."