The Lonely City is an investigation of the sites and sensations that attend the isolated person. In it, Laing interweaves the events of her own life with meditations on the lives and works of artists, among them Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz, and David Hopper. The character of loneliness itself emerges as a strikingly visual entity, but one that takes on many forms. [...]
Loneliness is a hunger for more intimacy than you have. For me—for most people, I think—it was an acutely painful state that felt very embarrassing and uncomfortable to inhabit. You can be lonely anywhere, but there's a particular flavor to living in a city: one becomes so intensely aware of how richly populated other people's lives are. The sense of being exposed or hyper-visible is intensified. [...]
One of the reasons I came to New York is that I felt the city has a kind of generosity to the solo inhabitant. All those innovations really help remove stigma, and make spaces easier to navigate. That said, there's a big difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is the fact of being alone; loneliness is the longing for more closeness, intimacy, and contact. So you can feel lonely in a relationship or around other people. What I think is important is finding ways to dismantle the pervasive shame around it.
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