Olivia Laing on Art, Solitude, and The Lonely City at 10 (Part One)

**Mia Sorenti** (0:00)
Hello, Intelligence Squared members, senior producer Mia Sorrenti here. What does it mean to be lonely in a world that has never been more connected? Today's members' episode is the full recording of our recent live event with writer and critic Olivia Laing.
Laing joined us at Union Chapel to discuss loneliness, intimacy and the search for connection. Mocking the 10th anniversary of The Lonely City, Laing reflects on the enduring questions at the heart of their landmark work. How we experience solitude, why we seek connection and what artists can teach us about living with isolation. Let's join our host Charlie Porter now live at Union Chapel.

**Charlie Porter** (0:48)
Hello, everyone. My name is Charlie Porter. This is Olivia Laing. Hi.
So, thank you all for being here for this Intelligence Squared event. The music you just heard was David's Dream by Midland, who is here tonight, and it features a recording, an audio diary by David Warnerovich, who we'll be talking about later. So, in 2016, Olivia Laing's third book, The Lonely City, was published. It immediately struck a chord. It cut through, finding an eager audience. This work of personal reflection and critical rigor did something totally new, allowing readers to acknowledge and interrogate their own experience of loneliness and of being alone.
It has become and continues to be a global bestseller, passed from reader to reader, an act of community, which is one of the book's lessons. Olivia has done so much since, including their eighth work, The Silver Book, a novel, which is just out in paperback. And there is so much more to come. But tonight is a rare chance to talk with Olivia about The Lonely City on this tenth anniversary. Just to start, Olivia, how are you feeling about talking about The Lonely City tonight?

**Olivia Laing** (2:28)
I, maybe 15 years ago, had an instinct that loneliness was something that we shared. And I feel very vindicated right now.
It just feels amazing to see a room full of people who, you know, have felt those feelings and found something, found that as a point to connect. So I guess I'm very excited for us to be talking.

**Charlie Porter** (2:50)
Yeah, great, great. So can we start by, can you take us to how the book came to be?

**Olivia Laing** (2:57)
Yeah, so I was living in New York. I was going to move to New York in a relationship. The relationship fell apart and I moved to New York anyway. And it was very exciting. It was very creatively stimulating. I was finishing off the trip to Echo Spring, which is the previous book. And at the same time, I sort of, I fell down a well into this experience of loneliness that really was unprecedented in my life that far.
I was in my mid-30s. I was very aware that my life had gone in a different direction to the people around me at the time. And it was acutely painful.
But at the same time, I think quite quickly, I realized that the experience I was having was a taboo experience. It was a thing that people didn't talk about. It was a thing that you didn't want to confess to other people.
And that sense that I had sort of wandered into unexplored ground, unacknowledged ground, started to become very exciting to me. And I think really quite quickly, I started thinking I need to write about this. And also really quite quickly, I was aware I didn't want to write a memoir. I didn't want to write just about my experience. What I wanted to do was make a map of the territory. And to do that, I needed to come at it from multiple different directions, which is where I started to think of the cast of characters.

**Charlie Porter** (4:38)
Yeah. Okay, so I'll say now, I read the book in proof. I have my proof here. Still with the markers from when I took it to that week's therapy with things I wanted to talk about.
We had met then. And I remember reading it, I remember on page eight. There are some times when you read a book and I have to just go like.

**Olivia Laing** (5:07)
What was on page eight?

**Charlie Porter** (5:09)
To page eight, there's this line. Loneliness, I began to realize, was a populated place, a city in itself. I was just like, oh my god. Because it was so immediately recognizable.
Can you talk about that feeling? Can you talk about that?

**Olivia Laing** (5:34)
Yeah, absolutely. I guess that's what I was saying about the sort of instinct that it was a, loneliness, when you're experiencing it yourself, feels like you are abject and alien, that you're sort of floating somewhere in an outer space region where there's nobody else. It feels very barren. It feels very unpopulated. And that's very frightening. I think loneliness is a frightening experience.