When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing,…
Catalog
Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing (1977) is a British writer and critic. Laing is known for her books which blend memoir and art criticism. 2Early life Laing was raised by a lesbian mother during the 1980s and has cited Section 28 as creating a "toxic atmosphere" growing up. 2Career Laing started her career as a cultural critic. She was the deputy books editor of The Observer and is a frequent contributor to The Guardian. In 2012 Laing published The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, a book that combined an examination of growing up in an alcoholic family with a look at six iconic American male writers who were alcoholics. In 2016 Laing published The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone in which she chronicled the lives of artists whose art reflected the loneliness of their interior lives, against the story of how she lived alone in New York Cit
There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings -- depression, anxiety,…
I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated, I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity. I wanted to hypnotize myself with data, with colored…
What did it mean to have AIDS at that time, when diagnosis was an almost certain death sentence? It meant being perceived as a monster, an object of terror even to medical personnel. It meant being trapped in a body that was regarded as repellent, toxic, unpredictable and dangerous.
Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the same that grows like thorns around it.
There is no substitute for touch, no substitute for love, but reading about someone else's commitment to discovering and admitting their desires was so deeply moving that I sometimes found I was physically shaking as I read.
Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.
My life felt very empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about a stained or threadbare piece of clothing.
A long time back, I used to listen to a song by Dennis Wilson. It was from 'Pacific Ocean Blue', the album he made after The Beach Boys fell apart. There was a line in it I loved: "loneliness is a very special place." As a teenager, sitting on my bed on autumn evenings, I used to imagine that place…
We are all of us like that boy sometimes. I mean we all carry something inside us that can be rejected; that can look silver in the light. You can deny it, or try and throw it in the garbage by all means. You can despise it so much you drink yourself halfway to death. At the end of the day, though,…
In her loving and sometimes shocking memoir, 'What It Used To Be Like', Maryann Buck Carver remembered an argument the couple had a few days after their wedding, in which her new husband announced that he regretted marrying and would always choose writing over her. Swallowing her own ambition, she…
It had struck me a long time back that the dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers. I'd been collecting them up, these little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution and death. Some were healthful: antidotes to a kind of felt dirtiness gathering…
I sense in some small part of myself how pleasurable it might be to let alcohol unhinge you, to take you down into an unreachable, sunken place, where sounds are very muted.
It wasn't the death he'd hope for, either way.
I wanted time to think, and what I wanted to think about was alcohol.