{"id":270968,"date":"2026-06-18T16:07:49","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:07:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/270968\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T16:07:49","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:07:49","slug":"the-lonely-city-by-olivia-laing-audiobook-review-solitude-and-creativity-in-manhattan-olivia-laing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/270968\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lonely City by Olivia Laing audiobook review \u2013 solitude and creativity in Manhattan | Olivia Laing"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a decade since Olivia Laing published The Lonely City<\/a>, a blend of memoir and cultural analysis on the isolation of urban living. Laing \u2013 who is non-binary \u2013 had moved to Manhattan following a love affair that ended abruptly. Once there, they were taken aback at their feelings of isolation. Laing discovered \u201cyou can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people\u201d.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s attempts to navigate these difficult feelings are threaded through a series of artist portraits<\/a> examining the connection between loneliness and creativity. There is Edward Hopper, famed for his paintings featuring lone figures seated in cafes and diners, and Henry Darger, the janitor and hospital worker who lived alone and achieved posthumous fame through his disturbing and hallucinatory paintings<\/a> of misfits. Laing also ponders the work of Andy Warhol, who surrounded himself with people while still keeping them at arm\u2019s length, and David Wojnarowicz, the American artist and photographer who documented the devastation caused by the Aids virus. His work, Laing notes, \u201cdid more than anything to release me from the burden of feeling that in my solitude I was shamefully alone\u201d.<\/p>\n

Actor Tilda Swinton<\/a> is the narrator for this new recording marking the book\u2019s tenth anniversary. Her reading (her first for an audiobook) is sharp yet reflective, tinged with curiosity and melancholy. Laing, who now lives in Suffolk, reads a new afterword in which she notes how loneliness is \u201ca part of being human: isolated in a body, condemned to live inside time. No one is truly immune to loneliness and what really matters is what we do with it and where it takes us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Available via Canongate Books, 9hr 36min<\/p>\n

Further listening<\/p>\n

Cursed Daughters
Oyinkan Braithwaite, WF Howes, 9hr 24min
Three readers \u2013 Weruche Opia, Diana Yekinni and Nnei Opia Clark \u2013 tackle this multigenerational novel which tells of a curse passed down through the women in a single family, consigning each to a life of heartbreak and loneliness.<\/p>\n

Always Winning
Ashley Walters, Transworld Digital, 6hr 43min
This memoir from the star of Adolescence and Top Boy finds him reflecting on his beginnings on a council estate in Peckham, south-east London; his teenage flirtation with gang violence; his time in UK rap collective So Solid Crew and his flourishing career as an actor and director. Read by the author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is a decade since Olivia Laing published The Lonely City, a blend of memoir and cultural analysis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-270968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}