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The Lonely City

Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

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The Lonely City

By: Olivia Laing
Narrated by: Zara Ramm
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About this listen

What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people?

When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-30s, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Fascinated by the experience, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between works and lives - from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism - Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.

Humane, provocative and deeply moving, The Lonely City is about the spaces between people and the things that draw them together, about sexuality, mortality and the magical possibilities of art. It's a celebration of a strange and lovely state, adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.

©2016 Olivia Laing (P)2016 Audible, Ltd Inspiring New York

Critic Reviews

"A triumphant book.... Laing is a brave writer, whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art." ( Telegraph)
"[Laing's] description of her acute loneliness feels unusually brave.... Sublime." ( The Times)
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This is self-indulgent poverty porn where the author (who is so lonely, so very lonely, which is pretty much all she is telling about herself) makes the destruction of a gritty grotty homosexual pre-aids New York city into her own personal tragedy. Dear Olivia would have been excluded from that scene too, but she doesn't consider that, too busy romanticising poverty, art, homosexuality and abuse. And the past. The present is terrible. The future unthinkable. Everything is awful.
If this is meant to be a scholastic work it's shallowly researched, if it's meant to be a memoir it doesn't actually reveal much about Olivia herself. It felt like Olivia Lang spent a year in New York - for whatever reason, she tells us why she got there, but not why she stayed while being so lonely. So lonely. She's so lonely. She keeps telling us that. She's too lonely to make friends. I guess she needed to finance the trip so she wrote this book.

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