Mel Campbell's Reviews > The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

While I was reading one of Olivia Laing's lucidly written, intellectually engaging meditations on loneliness and modern art, I was thinking how satisfying it is to read a perfectly crafted essay. It's a pleasure in direct proportion to how much I hate writing essays.

What I appreciated most about this book is that Laing doesn't make it all about herself. She's vividly present – as the biographical narrator, the avid investigator through archives, the aesthetic guide through the oeuvres of very different creative people, and the maker of judgments – but her own experiences are merely the hooks upon which she hangs the much more interesting material about other people.

I really struggle with the contemporary conflation of essay and memoir. Fucking Joan Didion. I dislike her work a lot. And I am so loath to write nonfiction myself. I dread the idea of having to make some abject spectacle of myself in order to be marketable as an essayist. Perhaps this is why, despite Laing's interest in American cities, I found The Lonely City more 'English' than Future Sex, which is firmly in that American tradition.

Hear more of my thoughts on this book at The Rereaders podcast.