The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Lang, 2016

This is a truly wonderful book, especially for those of us who are constantly anxious about being alone, being accepted, being noticed, etc, i.e. for just about everyone who has any introspection!  Lang, who evidently has struggled with depression and who has been chronically alone during much of her life, takes on this complex and misunderstood topic, combining a scholarly look at the psychology and psychiatric literature with her own experience of art and artists, drawing upon the well known (though clearly under-appreciated and not fully understood) like Hopper and Warhol as well as the obscure David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Zoe Leonard, and others.  The importance of early childhood experiences of comfort and nurture (seriously disturbed for both Wojnarowiz and Darger), the critical nature of integration and acceptance (and their opposites:  stigma and exclusion), and the relationship of loneliness to mental illness and suicide are brilliantly addressed.  Lang can turn a phrase as in the following:  Warhol’s tape recorder allowed him to ‘capture and hoard the messy, covetable litter of experience’ and ‘simultaneously testify to the importance, the beauty even, of what people actually say and how they say it:  the great jumbled inconsequential endlessly unfinished business of ordinary existence.”  Her key concept is that loneliness (“an overwhelming, unmeetable need for attention and affection, to be heard and touched and seen“) can be addressed by art, “preparing oneself for the dangerous lovely business’ of intimacy” through “some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives.  It does have the 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.”  Her final conclusion is that the cure for loneliness does not depend on meeting someone but is about two things:  “learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many 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.”  This is a very important and thought-provoking book!