Lonely: A Memoir

by Emily White

Nobody knows, I told myself when I came home on a Friday evening to an empty apartment, or when I went to bed on a Sunday night after having spent the weekend alone. It was comforting to me that, even if loneliness was emerging as a significant problem, it was at least a problem I was able to hide. And hiding it felt crucial. Loneliness, at the start of the wired-up twenty-first century, was so totally nowhere, so crushingly uncool. The word itself made me cringe. The state jarred with the image I tried to project, which was that of a clever, together young woman who had few emotional needs—or at least few needs that weren’t being met. Having someone spot my loneliness made me feel outsmarted, as though I were a child caught out at a game.