The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

‘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.’

So writes Olivia Laing at the opening of The Lonely City, which I came to at a particularly lonely moment in my own life: April 2020, when all the casual dates, spontaneous beers, snap decisions to eat at my corner bar vanished, all suddenly forbidden by Sydney’s Covid-19 lockdown regulations.

Laing’s opening pages, where she introduces her subject and her own uncomfortable immersion in it, reverberate with such raw pain and fathomless need I found them almost too distressing to read. But I was soon swallowed by her mesmerising prose and fluid meditations on being shockingly alone in the streets and sublets of New York City.

When the man she’s come to NYC for suddenly changes his mind, Laing is cast adrift. And in the absence of love, she finds solace and communion in her new city, and in the work and lives of its artists, most of whom walked the same streets she walks as she’s thronged by loneliness, searching out alleviations – sex, alcohol, a masked Halloween party, dating apps, internet scrolling, and, always, looking, at screens, at art. It’s here, in visual art and its associated materials (letters, manuscripts. archives), that she begins to find company in her chronic isolation.

This is an extraordinary book. From within her acute experience of being alone Laing opens herself out to scrutinise and attend to the lives of others, harnessing her loneliness to consider ‘some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive’. She takes her cue from Virginia Woolf, who in 1929 described a sense of inner loneliness she thought might be illuminating to analyse, adding: ‘If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.’

As with other exemplary contemporary works of creative nonfiction, such as Anne Boyer’s The Undying, The Lonely City traverses multitudes, including psychiatry and psychoanalysis, history, cultural theory, biography and memoir, to explore the landscape and peculiar paradoxes, the self-perpetuating nature of acute loneliness, chillingly articulated by Robert Weiss, who called it ‘an almost eerie affliction of the spirits’. And loneliness is hugely consequential: according to a 2010 study, it can kill.

In Laing’s hands the question of loneliness bristles with further questions – such as in the passage below – which she continues to ask and tease out throughout the book so that by its closing pages it has most unexpectedly become an ode.

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, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?

Laing’s prose flows seamlessly from one scene, one idea, to another, all related under her expansive gaze. Such as her shift from a moment of frank clarity about the link between her loneliness and age (‘an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure’) to the people partying out her window to Edward Hopper: ‘What is it about Hopper?’ 

The book works like this: Laing crawling through the endless days, across the city, her mind wandering, alighting on a new theme, a new artist. Each chapter introduces an artist, one who’ll dominate her thoughts over the next 50 or so pages: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Klaus Noni, Josh Harris, Zoe Leonard. But each new artist brings with them a community of friends, collaborators, lovers and/or kindred spirits, and characters recur – so the whole book weaves together like a party on the Lower East Side. In other words, it’s a stunning incarnation of New York City itself and all the life that teems there, broken, excessive, dazzling, creatively brilliant. And just when you think Laing’s exhausted a subject, she twists it round and milks it again. This is gloriously seductive writing.

In her chapter on Hopper, Laing also attends to his wife Josephine ‘Jo’ Nivison. She’s concerned with the challenges women face in accessing the city’s public spaces, including its galleries, which Jo embodied and which Laing herself feels before the porn cinemas on 42nd Street. There’s a glitch in this utopia: ‘At least as far as I was concerned. In the context of the cinemas, the piers, citizens meant men, not women.’ Loneliness is also a function of gender, sexuality, desirability:

If I was to itemise my loneliness … I would have to admit that some of it at least was to do with anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable, and that lodged more deeply beneath that was the growing acknowledgement that in addition to never being able to quite escape the expectations of gender, I was not at all comfortable with the gender box to which I’d been assigned.

Was it that the box was too small, with its preposterous expectations of what women are, or was it that I didn’t fit? Fish. I’d never been comfortable with the demands of femininity, had always felt more like a boy, a gay boy, that I inhabited a gender position somewhere between the binaries of male and female, some impossible other, some impossible both.

In an all too familiar story, after marrying Hopper aged 41, Jo gives up her studio and her own career dwindles away. This is partly because she devotes herself to her husband’s art. But it’s also because Edward opposes it. He ‘didn’t just fail to support Jo’s painting, but rather worked actively to discourage it, mocking and denigrating the few things she did manage to produce, and acting with great creativity and malice to limit the conditions in which she might paint.’

So Hopper’s chapter becomes a double portrait – as Warhol’s becomes a seething crowd. Who can say anything new about Andy Warhol? Olivia Laing. Her portrait of Warhol is poignant, generous, attentive. For a book on loneliness, relationships and the relational abound, no matter how fleeting, how cursory. It’s a cursory encounter that for me sits at the punch-in-the-guts centre of this punchy book. It’s from East Village artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, a passage from his memoir Close to the Knives recalling sex with a stranger on the Chelsea piers:

In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives tyring to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life. 

‘That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it?’ writes Laing. ‘That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.’

The Lonely City is an astonishing book, open hearted and intellectually capacious, studded with sublime moments of nuanced and subtle perception. It undulates. Laing is a master of rhythmic prose and musing on ideas. Her book is deeply satisfying, immensely companionable.