The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

There are many things that art cannot do. Art cannot bring the dead back to life, it cannot solve problems between friends, or solve the problem of global warming. And yet art has some extraordinary functions: a strange capacity to negotiate between human beings, especially between those who have never met and who are able to enrich and complete one another’s lives. It also has the power to create intimacy; it has its own way of healing wounds and, better still, it can show us that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly. Olivia Laing, a woman who moved to New York City because she was in love, found that suddenly, without warning, after she had left her home in London, her lover changed his mind and no longer wanted to live with her in New York. In the absence of love she found herself clinging desperately to the city itself, and decided to stay in New York alone and begin the long journey of healing. On that journey Olivia came to know the work of four of the most important artists of the twentieth century, who dealt intensively with the theme of loneliness in their work: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz. Not all of them were permanent residents of the lonely city, but they knew a great deal about the distances between people, and about what it means to feel lonely even in a crowd.