The Lonely City

When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art.

Moving fluidly between the works and lives of some of the city’s most compelling artists, Laing conducts an eclectic, dazzling investigation into what it means it be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be redeemed and embraced.

How are you doing, really? Are you on lockdown? Are you a key worker?

I’m at home. In the past two weeks I went from working in an office, to working from home, to furloughed from work until further notice, the magazine I work on suspended from publication. I live with housemates, all men, none I am particularly close to – though we’re getting a bit closer, inevitably I guess. I’m lonely, and I am afraid what the total lack of structure in my life will do to my brain, which veers towards the angsty and sad even at the best of times.

I’ve gotten really into Money Heist. Like, to be honest, that show is my life now and I don’t know what I’m going to do when it’s over. If you have any recommendations they will be gratefully received.

What I’m saying is that one way or another, it felt like the perfect time to revisit, The Lonely City, a book of essays by Olivia Laing that I read during my months of non-blogging. When I picked up the book and reread a couple of essays this morning to refresh my memory for this very review it felt like a risk – would this make me feel better, or would it make the dread that has been creeping over me since the weekend all the worse?

Fortunately, it was the former. The Lonely City isn’t precisely an uplifting read, but it is a cathartic one. Post-break up and in a foreign country, Olivia wrote this book in a period of absolute solitude. During that time, when even ordering a coffee became a challenge because she felt so painfully self-conscious about herself (something I felt on a spiritual level), she found solace and a kind of kindship in the stories of the lonely artists that came before her. She looked at the work they created to fix themselves – or if not that, patch over their worst of it – as a road map for the way out of her own heartbreak, which began over one person and over time grew into something much larger than that.

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”

The book is filled with stories of artists, a lot of them from the 70s and 80s, and the various ways they did and did not manage to connect in their lives and work. They are painful, bittersweet and comforting all at the same time. Maybe my favourite was the story of Andy Warhol, who, hampered first by his weak grasp of English and second by his paralysing hatred of his body, started to use technology as a means of shielding himself from others. He started carrying a tape recorder with him everywhere he went, recording all of his interactions as part of some wider art project that seemed like it was as much about creating a means of holding himself at a safe distance from his friends and boyfriends as it was the end product, a book called a, which no one read.

These essays are filled with people who lived their lives on the fringes; people of colour, queer people, the mentally ill and those living in poverty, many of them not allowed a voice during their lifetimes. People like Henry Darger, the janitor who spent his entire life in poverty who was discovered to be an incredibly prolific artist and writer when his landlord came to clean out his apartment after he’d been hospitalised for what would be the final time. He may also have been a total psycho (his artwork is scary weird) – but nobody ever knew him, so no one knows for sure.

The Lonely City is an exploration of a subject we’re all facing right now in new and frightening ways. What is a world where we can’t go around to your friend’s place to watch a movie? How do you cope when all you want is a hug from your mum, but she is quarantined miles away from you? What this book does, somewhat paradoxically, is classify loneliness as a community experience – because at some point, to some degree, we’ve all been there.

Especially right now.

“If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.”

The Night Circus

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Well, we live in Coronaworld now. I hope you are safe and well and have plenty of books to make it through your self-isolation/social distancing.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is another one of those hugely hyped reads it took me forever to get around to. But, faced with a long car journey (I was not behind the wheel, don’t worry) before which I spotted in it a second hand book shop, I decided it was time to take the plunge.

Ooof.

The Night Circus is really everything you want from a work of fiction. Magical, romantic and oh-so-atmospheric, I was transported into the world of Le Cirque des Rêves – and in no particular hurry to leave it. Fortune tellers, acrobats, conjurors, contortionists, dancers and illusionists populate the circus, which travels all around the world, suddenly appearing and captivating a place for a few days before vanishing once again.

It’s a beefy book – coming in at just under 500 pages – but the non-linear narrative serves to drive the plot ever-forward. It’s like Erin is handing you a selection of puzzle pieces you gradually fit together in a series of satisfying ‘ah ha!’ moments as present and past suddenly, finally come together.

The story is just so vast – it centres around Marco and Celia’s competition, yes, but quickly reaches outwards into the lives of the other circus performers, patrons, associates and conspirators. We jump between various time lines, learning of deaths before they have happened (though that makes them no less painful once we do witness them in real time), see characters end up in despair without yet understanding how they got there and learn of a huge and bleak something bearing down on the magical place but without yet understanding how the bleak thing started – or how the performers of Le Cirque des Rêves might stop it.

Erin Morgenstern’s writing makes me think of Laini Taylor, so rich and detailed are her descriptions. I felt I was there, wandering the looping pathways around the ever-burning bonfire at the centre of the circus, peeking inside the performance tents, each more magical than the next. Even in the structure of Erin’s writing – down to her individual word choices – there is magic.

I’ve never really been into the idea of running away to the circus before, but since I read this it’s all I want to do.

The Night Circus is one of those incredibly difficult books to review because the joy of it, I think, is in the not knowing. All I can say is that I recommend going into this much hyped novel as blind as you can – and letting it sweep you away. There’s a pandemic happening. If there’s anything we need right now it’s escapism, and it doesn’t come more escapist than this epic feat of imagination.

Just One Day

When sheltered American good girl Allyson “LuLu” Healey first meets laid-back Dutch actor Willem De Ruiter at an underground performance of Twelfth Night in England, there’s an undeniable spark. After just one day together, that spark bursts into a flame, or so it seems to Allyson, until the following morning, when she wakes up after a whirlwind day in Paris to discover that Willem has left. Over the next year, Allyson embarks on a journey to come to terms with the narrow confines of her life, and through Shakespeare, travel, and a quest for her almost-true-love, to break free of those confines.

Hello.

I would like to get back to this blogging thing.

I am very rusty. You may have to bear with me on this.

I remember a few years ago when Just One Year by Gayle Forman, the sequel to Just One Day, the book I’m reviewing today, came out. I was pretty new to blogging and it felt as though everyone was talking about it. At the time I thought it sounded like a typical romance that didn’t spark my interest (I am yet to read Just One Year so no spoilers please), so of course I never bothered picking up its predecessor. That is, until one of my housemates gave me her copy of Just One Day and told me that I. Must. Read. This. Book.  

So I did, and mate, now do I understand what all the fuss is about. Just One Day, like so many YA books marketed toward girls, is sold as this great story of romance. And while, yes, it is romantic as fuck, that isn’t really the point. It’s about identity, and how for some people that is so heavily informed by parents, friends and their expectations, that what it means to you, for yourself, gets totally lost. That’s what life is like for Allyson. Eighteen years old, she is stuck in the achingly familiar trap of friends she doesn’t have anything in common with and parents who are caring, but utterly oppressive, and she’s just about to crash land into the next stage of her life, university, when everything is supposed to change – except, it doesn’t.

In the midst of this her parents send her on a trip to Europe with the ‘best friend’ she has long since ceased to have anything in common with and she runs into Willem.

Willem.

Willem might actually be one of the hottest book boyfriends ever written. Allyson meets him at an outdoor staging on Twelfth Night and then in a completely out of character move it’ll take her almost half the book to replicate, she runs away to Paris with him for – you guessed it – just one day. Considering Allyson will spend the entire rest of the book obsessing about this man who – as the blurb says – vanishes, he had to be pretty special to sustain your interest. I won’t go into it too much because, spoilers, but suffice to say had I spent really any amount of time with this man, I would have been obsessed with him too.

But, as much as we love Willem (and I really can’t emphasise enough how much we do), it’s after his disappearance that the bulk of Allyson’s character development takes place.

Allyson can be kind of a frustrating character. She’s passive, moody and defeatist. But stick with her. All of these traits – which could easily be unbearably annoying – work in Allyson because of the care Gayle Forman has taken to demonstrate why Allyson is the way she is. She has spent her entire life with no space to breathe; her parents have scheduled and controlled everything down to a T, and the guilt her mother heaps on top of her whenever she tries to switch up the dynamic is so intense you really can’t blame her for crumbling almost every time. It is that sense of crumbling – which we see Allyson do a lot of throughout the book – that makes her such a believable character and ultimately somebody that you want to root for. Digging her way out of the trench that her parents have kept her in is a true struggle.

For Allyson, finding the way out begins with wanting to find the boy – that’s the motivation. But it’s never really about that. In finding for the first time, something – someone – she desperately wants, it’s like she reclaims a little piece of herself back from the pressures around her. She finds a piece of herself that is her own. That feeling, that wanting is strong enough to push up against the guilt that has controlled her for her entire life – and once the spark is lit, it only grows. And Allyson has to follow it.

So Just One Day isn’t so much a romance novel. It’s about building yourself.

It’s about being afraid – and how that fear can totally dominate your life if you let it.

It’s about not letting it.

Yeah, this was a book written for teenagers but, as a 27-year-old woman navigating a life completely changed from the one I had a year ago (hence the total lack of blogging, which, honestly, sorry not sorry) I found it so inspiring. And comforting too.

Change is hard, but worth it.