It is a decade since Olivia Laing published The Lonely City, a blend of memoir and cultural analysis on the isolation of urban living. Laing – who is non-binary – had moved to Manhattan following a love affair that ended abruptly. Once there, they were taken aback at their feelings of isolation. Laing discovered “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”.
The author’s attempts to navigate these difficult feelings are threaded through a series of artist portraits examining the connection between loneliness and creativity. There is Edward Hopper, famed for his paintings featuring lone figures seated in cafes and diners, and Henry Darger, the janitor and hospital worker who lived alone and achieved posthumous fame through his disturbing and hallucinatory paintings of misfits. Laing also ponders the work of Andy Warhol, who surrounded himself with people while still keeping them at arm’s length, and David Wojnarowicz, the American artist and photographer who documented the devastation caused by the Aids virus. His work, Laing notes, “did more than anything to release me from the burden of feeling that in my solitude I was shamefully alone”.
Actor Tilda Swinton is the narrator for this new recording marking the book’s tenth anniversary. Her reading (her first for an audiobook) is sharp yet reflective, tinged with curiosity and melancholy. Laing, who now lives in Suffolk, reads a new afterword in which she notes how loneliness is “a part of being human: isolated in a body, condemned to live inside time. No one is truly immune to loneliness and what really matters is what we do with it and where it takes us.”
Available via Canongate Books, 9hr 36min
Further listening
Cursed Daughters
Oyinkan Braithwaite, WF Howes, 9hr 24min
Three readers – Weruche Opia, Diana Yekinni and Nnei Opia Clark – tackle this multigenerational novel which tells of a curse passed down through the women in a single family, consigning each to a life of heartbreak and loneliness.
Always Winning
Ashley Walters, Transworld Digital, 6hr 43min
This memoir from the star of Adolescence and Top Boy finds him reflecting on his beginnings on a council estate in Peckham, south-east London; his teenage flirtation with gang violence; his time in UK rap collective So Solid Crew and his flourishing career as an actor and director. Read by the author.