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