‘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: 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.
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