Book By: Olivia Laing
“Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel.”
Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City isn’t a cure for loneliness—it’s a quiet companion to it. Part memoir, part cultural meditation, the book explores what it means to be alone in a crowd, tracing Laing’s own isolation in New York alongside the lives of artists like Hopper, Warhol, and Wojnarowicz, who each wrestled with solitude in their work.
Loneliness, Laing writes, feels “like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.” It’s more than a lack of company—it’s a lack of belonging, of being seen, of being touched. The book is filled with moments that pierce: the man whose room was discovered, after his death, to be crammed with unseen paintings; the person who likened hell not to fire but to ice—frozen in isolation.
Reading The Lonely City was not always easy. Some passages made me pause, shaken—lines about invisibility, speechlessness, the yearning for closeness that intimacy can’t quite satisfy. But there is a strange comfort in how Laing doesn’t try to resolve this feeling. Instead, she names it. She offers the idea that our loneliness isn’t always personal—it’s shaped by the world, by systems that exclude, stigmatize, and silence.
Art, she argues, can’t save us. But it can witness us. It can reach across silence and say, “You’re not the only one.”
I picked up this book expecting insight and found resonance instead. Reading it during a time when I, too, felt somewhat apart from the world, I found myself underlining passages like lifelines. Laing didn’t offer me answers, but she gave me language. And sometimes, that’s enough.
Notes#
Chapter 1: The Lonely City#
- 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.
- When he gave up his room unwillingly at the age of eighty to die in a Catholic mission home, it was found to be stuffed with hundreds of exquisite and disturbing paintings, work he’d apparently never shown to another human being.
Chapter 2: Walls of Glass#
- What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged.
- . . . and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time.
- I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held.
- ‘Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person’s empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person’s loneliness.’
- ‘I don’t know why people think of hell as a place where there is heat and where warm fires are burning. That is not hell. Hell is if you are frozen in isolation into a block of ice. That is where I have been.’
- ‘Why can’t the lonely change?’. . . ‘They must find a perverse gratification in loneliness; perhaps loneliness, despite its pain, permits them to continue a self-protective isolation or provides them with an emotional handicap that forces handouts of pity from those with whom they interact.’
- When people enter into an experience of loneliness, they trigger what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat, a phenomenon Weiss first postulated back in the 1970s.
- It’s a different thing from quietness, silence; more powerful, more aggressive.
- ‘I declare myself in my paintings.’ And again, a little later: ‘I don’t think I ever tried to paint the American scene. I’m trying to paint myself’.
- . . . an erotics of insufficient intimacy, which is of course a synonym for loneliness itself.
- ‘The most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature’.
- The need to keep her punishingly distant and then to bring her close, to change her face and body into the sexual, self-contained woman at the counter, lost in thought.
- Marriage and high income serve as mild deterrents, but the truth is that few of us are absolutely immune to feeling a greater longing for connection than we find ourselves able to satisfy.
Chapter 3: My Heart Opens to Your Voice#
- The change in habitat marked another phase of loneliness; a period in which speech became an increasingly perilous endeavour.
- If you are not being touched at all, then speech is the closest contact it is possible to have with another human being.
- No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can’t you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much?
- . . . and sometimes in the middle of a sentence I feel like a foreigner trying to talk it because I have word spasms where the parts of some words begin to sound peculiar to me and in the middle of saying the word I’ll think, ‘Oh, this can’t be right – this sounds very peculiar, I don’t know if I should try to finish up this word or try to make it into something else, because if it comes out good it’ll be right, but if it comes out bad it’ll sound retarded,’ and so in the middle of words that are over one syllable, I sometimes get confused and try to graft other words on top of them . . . I can hardly talk what I already talk.
- I think we’re in a vacuum here at the Factory: it’s great. I like being in a vacuum; it leaves me alone to work.’
- Lonely self, trapped in the prison of the body, uncertain that anyone else exists.
- Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around you; talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence:
- SCUM Manifesto. . . . Scum: extraneous matter or impurities; a low, vile or worthless person or group of people.
- The vicious circle by which loneliness proceeds does not happen in isolation, but rather as an interplay between the individual and the society in which they are embedded, a process perhaps worsened if they are already a sharp critic of that society’s inequities.
Chapter 4: In Loving Him#
- ‘The solitude of two persons passing in opposite directions creates a personal seclusion’
- There is no substitute for touch, no substitute for love, but reading about someone’s else’s commitment to discovering and admitting their desires was so deeply moving that I sometimes found I was physically shaking as I read.
- But if sex is a cure for isolation, it is also a source of alienation in its own right, capable of igniting precisely the dangerous forces that swept Scottie off his feet in Vertigo. Possessiveness, jealousy, obsession; an inability to tolerate rejection, ambivalence or loss.
Chapter 5: The Realms of The Unreal#
- Despite the discomfort, the infants kept clinging on, willing to face even pain in their quest for affection, for something soft to cuddle up to.
- ‘My life was like in a sort of Heaven there. Do you think I might be fool enough to run away from heaven if I get there?’ Heaven: a place in which during his own time children were regularly beaten, raped and abused.
- Pain was everywhere in the painting, though not everyone was capable of acknowledging it.
- Loneliness can derive from the conviction that there is no person or group to which one belongs. This not belonging can be seen to have a much deeper meaning. However much integration proceeds, it cannot do away with the feeling that certain components of the self are not available because they are split off and cannot be regained. Some of these split-off parts . . . are projected into other people, contributing to the feeling that one is not in full possession of one’s self, that one does not fully belong to oneself or, therefore, to anybody else. The lost parts too, are felt to be lonely.
Chapter 6: At The Beginning of The End of The World#
- Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it.
- Bearing in mind that both loneliness and rejection are stressful experiences, which have ravaging effects on the body, it’s shocking but not exactly surprising to discover that being subject to stigma has a powerful physical effect.
- ‘If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would.’
- I am glass, clear empty glass . . . No gesture can touch me. I’ve been dropped into all this from another world and I can’t speak your language any longer . . . I feel like a window, maybe a broken window. I am a glass human. I am a glass human disappearing in the rain. I am standing among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words . . . I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough. . . Invisibility and speechlessness, ice and glass: the classic imagery of loneliness, of being cut off.
Chapter 7: Render Ghosts#
- Your favourite part of having a smartphone is never having to call anyone again, the source of the gadget’s pernicious appeal is not that it will absolve its owner of the need for people but that it will provide connection to them – connection, furthermore, of a risk-free kind, in which the communicator need never be rejected, misunderstood or overwhelmed, asked to supply more attention, closeness or time than they are willing to offer up.
- I love my mother virtually and not physically. I was bred by her to sit in front of a TV set for hours on end. That’s how I’ve been trained. You know the most important friend to me growing up was in fact the television . . . My emotionality is not derived from other humans . . . I was emotionally neglected but virtually I could absorb the electronic calories from the world inside the television.
- Love without risk. Love that is simply the dissemination of one’s own face, its incessant replication.
Chapter 8: Strange Fruit#
- There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.
- I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.
Cover photo from socialself.com