Friend of Creativity

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I found my way to this extraordinary book by Olivia Laing thanks to a passing, passionate, intriguing mention of it on a radio programme. I am a big fan of such serendipitous routes to reading matter, but actually, on this occasion, I feel a sort of retrospective fear that 'The Lonely City' might otherwise have passed me by. It is that good. That important. It also happens to be the most perfect book to have opened open during a time of global lock-down.

'The Lonely City' defies easy categorisation. It is partly a memoir, encompassing the period when Olivia Laing moved to New York in the wake of a failed relationship in her mid-thirties. She therefore approaches her descriptions of the city in the shadow of that personal loss - focusing on the sensation, familiar, surely, to all of us, of the heightened acuteness of being alone while surrounded by thousands of people. Every sentence is arresting, Laing having that knack - possessed by all the best writers - of inhabiting her deepest experiences at the same time as ingeniously making sense of them. Yet, this is no 'misery memoir'. She craves and seeks out solitude - it suits her fragile, introspective state - but not for wallowing. Instead, it is the creativity of the lonely state that Laing explores, casting pearls as she goes. Like this early, brief example:
"Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place; a city in itself."
Wow.

As the book progresses, the memoir aspect expands to include examinations of how four specific New York based artists experienced and deployed loneliness in their work. These include Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper whose life-stories and creations Laing picks apart like a detective, making tender and compelling observations to highlight how the lure of solitude formed the engine and the essence of their output. This made 'The Lonely City' a page-turning art lesson on top of everything else, and a heartbreaking one too, since the artists she chooses had lives filled as much with suffering as with genius.

Threaded through the narrative, the heartbeat behind the scenes, is the bigger journey of emotional healing being undertaken by the author. Compassionate, candid, insightful, Olivia Laing's voice reaches out to the reader like a wise friend. I learnt so much. I was moved. As a writer myself, in lock-down, fighting my own battles with isolation and a book to finish, the central message of 'The Lonely City' also happened to be exactly the one I needed to hear: that a sense of alone-ness is the ally, not the enemy of creativity, something to embrace rather than fear.



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