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,…
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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
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.