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 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.
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…