The Lonely City (whose subtitle is “Adventures in the Art of Being Alone”) is a blend of the personal and the art-historical, though a bit heavier on the latter. Laing writes about how she had been planning to move to New York City from England to be with a man who then changed his mind; she ended up living in the city on her own, moving from one sublet to another, finding comfort in visual art and music as she went through a period where she was “inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis” (5). The works of art in which she found solace “seemed to articulate or be troubled by loneliness” themselves, and the book is an exploration of that art/those artists/their lives and stories (ibid.).
Most of the book’s chapters focus on a particular artist: there’s one about Edward Hopper, another about Andy Warhol, one about David Wojnarowicz, another about Henry Darger, another about Klaus Nomi. (I liked all these chapters, especially the one about Wojnarowicz.) There’s also an introductory chapter, a concluding chapter that talks a bit about Zoe Leonard’s “Strange Fruit” and Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, and a chapter about loneliness and the internet that discusses the work of Josh Harris, an internet entrepreneur who ran a live-streaming project called Quiet in which sixty people lived together for a month in a basement pod hotel. (I found the internet/Josh Harris chapter the weakest, though I liked the bits in it about Laing’s fondness for Craigslist and experiences placing ads on it.)
While I found Laing’s discussions of specific artworks and the lives of artists interesting, and while I also liked her discussions of the larger culture in which these artists were working, my favorite parts of the book were probably the pieces we see of Laing’s own story, whether she’s talking about living in a room on 43rd Street and 8th Avenue and waking to the lights of the city in the middle of the night, or about ordering coffee in the East Village and how when you’re lonely, social interactions with strangers or near-strangers are much more fraught. And I love how Laing writes about her experience of New York City, in sentences like this: “It was winter now, the sky bright blue, buckets of copper-colored chrysanthemums outside the bodegas” (110). Or this: “In the absence of love, I found myself clinging hopelessly to the city itself: the repeating tapestry of psychics and bodegas, the bump and grind of traffic, the live lobsters on the corner of Ninth Avenue, the steam drifting up from beneath the streets” (12-13).
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