The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

If, like me, you’re a reader who believes stories can tell you how to live in the world, then there’s a certain pleasure in solitude and being in your own head while discovering other people’s words and lives through the act of reading a book. 

I love to read on the tube, surrounded by fellow travelers and aware of the humanity swarming above ground, precisely because of that feeling of being in a little bubble while still forming a part of something bigger. But this is a very different experience of being alone in the city from the one that Olivia Laing describes so brilliantly in this book.

Laing moves to New York to be with a lover, gets dumped and begins to feel isolated, unseen and increasingly odd in the thronging world of the city. So she does what any self-respecting nerd would do and turns to art, books, music, and films to try to make sense of what’s happening to her and to articulate the loneliness she feels. She manages to sweep through a vast array of literature, photos, and songs as she goes, mixing up her own story with other people’s attempts to portray or escape loneliness, but particularly fixates on four artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Henry Darger. 

I liked her writing about Warhol, mainly because I hadn’t thought about his loneliness before as he seems to be eternally surrounded by his glittering entourage in my mind, but he seems so awkward and tongue-tied in her descriptions, keeping people at bay with his tape recorder even as he seeks them out. I was also delighted to see her writing about Valerie Solanas alongside Warhol, a person whose loneliness, mentally and physically, had such an impact on her own art and need to befriend (and later shoot) Warhol.

Best of all are the sections on Wojnarowicz, a fascinating artist whose experience of loneliness during his horrible childhood was abated by his homosexuality and discovery of the Chelsea Piers scene, where men went to cruise and have sex in semi-public spaces. Later, he raged against the US government’s lack of interest in its gay citizens who were dying of AIDS in their thousands, in what Laing describes as a sort of state-sponsored alienation and loneliness. Laing’s discussion of gender and identity in these sections is fascinating, and I would’ve liked more about her personal feelings on these things. 

But I think what makes these chapter of the book my favourites are the sense that she wishes she could’ve been friends with David Wojnarowicz. Reading this book made me want to be friends with Laing, which seems a rather lovely outcome to find in a book about the sometimes overwhelming difficulty of making connections with other people.

Sarah