The Lonely City

Reviews

“An impressive and beguiling combination of autobiography and biography, a balancing act that Laing effortlessly performs.”

“Every page of The Lonely City exudes a disarming, deep-down fondness for humanity.”

“A beautiful meander of a book.”

“Laing…picks up the topic of painful urban isolation and sets it down in many smart and oddly consoling places. She makes the topic her own.”

“Reminding us of how it feels to be lonely, this book gently affirms our connectedness.”

“An uncommonly observant hybrid of memoir, history, and cultural criticism.”

“Her book succeeds in offering its readers a redemptive experience comparable to the one she’s describing…This triumphant book is in part an appeal for us to value the kind of loneliness that can be rendered, by the intimacy of art, both tolerable and shareable.”

“[An] acute, nervy and personal investigation into urban solitude…A group biography all in one, which takes a difficult, almost taboo, subject and deftly turns it over anew.”

“Laing joins the ever-growing pool of writers…who are transforming memoir into a daring and dynamic literary form of discovery.”

“Laing creates a ‘map of loneliness,’ tracking its often-paradoxical contours in her own life as a transplant to New York City and traces how loneliness can inspire creativity…She invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the Internet (which turns her into an obsessed teenager, albeit one who calls the screen her ‘cathected silver lover’). For once, loneliness becomes a place worth lingering.”

“Absorbing melding of memoir, biography, art essay, and philosophical meditation…Illuminating, enriching.”

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