The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award (2016) for its original analysis of well-known works, Olivia Laing’s book explores various expressions of loneliness in art and ways in which being lonely informs our experience of it.

Taking her own experience of lonely life in a big city as a starting point, Laing devotes her study to other artists who found themselves living on their own in New York and tackled their loneliness in their work.

As Laing points out, «loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability to find as much intimacy as is desired.» Artists, whose very different lives are discussed in the book, include Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Henry Darger.

Outcasts were a recurrent theme in the work of Wojnarowicz, who left home to roam the streets as a teenager. Warhol’s life seems to have been just the opposite: he was in the centre of it all, always surrounded by celebrity friends, film stars, underground artists, and musicians.