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Olivia Laing: The bulk of the book takes place between 2011 and 2015. I was subletting and coming and going on tourist visas. I still spend a lot of time in the city.How does your perception of the city change when you're merely visiting, rather than living there?
You skate the surface as a visitor, don't you. It's when you're living somewhere that you really have to grapple with it. You're required to engage more deeply, which can be threatening if you're lonely, or offer possibilities of connection.What aspects of NYC made it feel lonelier than where you lived in the UK?
I think the thing about Manhattan for me is that it's a small island, so there's an incredible density to it. London is sprawling and atomized, but in NYC everyone is living on top of each other. Everywhere you go, you're overlooked, which is why you get that classic Edward Hopper sense of both being hyper-exposed and weirdly cut off by the architecture of the city—something that echoes and intensifies loneliness in a weird and interesting way.After writing about authors and alcoholism in your last book, what made you hone in on visual artists for the topic of loneliness?
I didn't want to write about writers again—The Trip to Echo Spring investigated the difficult ground between making fiction and telling lies, the former being the work of the writer and the latter being the compulsion of the alcoholic. It was fascinating to work there, but I wanted a change afterwards. And so much of the experience of urban loneliness, at least initially, was visual, so Hopper felt like the obvious place to start.
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Do you think the city was ever a more welcoming place, or is it New York's constant state of flux that brings on these feelings of isolation?A city is composed of multiple forces, always, and the trick is to find your place, your community, 'your tribe,' as Wojnarowicz would say, within it.
I talk about a lot of different times in the book, running really from the 1930s to the present day, but I don't have any great nostalgia for a lost New York. Each era has ways in which it promotes contact, but also has ways that inhibit it. So when I'm talking about Wojnarowicz, I spend a lot of time mulling over his writing about the derelict Hudson piers, which in the 1970s and 80s were cruising grounds, temporary autonomous zones, places where people made art in a very wild way. To me, those are exciting spaces for kinds of contact that are less easy to find in our very hygienic, corporate century. But I don't think for a minute that the city in that era was benign or welcoming. A city is composed of multiple forces, always, and the trick is to find your place, your community—"your tribe" as Wojnarowicz would say—within it.
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Hopper's subject is modernity and his paintings radiate anxiety about the changing city. They're nostalgic and fearful about the growing urbanization of the city, the dehumanizing structures. But it's by no means political art. Wojnarowicz, on the other hand, is a political artist: He explicitly sees his work as a way of making changes in the world, both in magical and very practical ways.You use the phrase "the loneliness of urban restructuring" at one point in the book. When you see constant demolition and construction in a city like New York, what effect do you think that has on loneliness?
I don't think cities changing per se is a problem; the problem is gentrification—the capital-driven process by which some people are made less welcome in cities than others. My argument in this book in terms of urban spaces is really that diversity is the best antidote to isolation: that our urban spaces need to include as many different kinds of people as possible, and to resist the drive towards homogeneity. So it doesn't matter so much that demolition is happening, but rather what is being replaced and what is doing the replacing. St. Marks Bookstore, [for example]. A place that promotes contact and exchange is clearly a more powerful antidote to urban isolation than a Chase bank or a fro-yo joint.
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I came out of the direct action movement in the 1990s, and was involved in setting up squatted arts centers and community spaces. I think the trick to making places welcome to diverse groups is for them to be set up and run by diverse groups. But I wasn't necessarily thinking just about art. Somewhere like the Ali Forney Center, which is a space for queer homeless teens, seems like an absolute model of the kind of place that can dispel isolation in a city.
What else do you hope readers take away from The Lonely City?What I wanted to add to the conversation was the idea that loneliness is also political, that it happens to certain people because of stigma and exclusion.
What I wanted to add to the conversation was the idea that loneliness is also political, that it happens to certain people because of stigma and exclusion—things like racism, homophobia, transphobia, or reactions to illness and disability. Also, I wanted to think about shame, which is such an agonizing component of loneliness, and to do as much as I could to dispel it, to remind us all that loneliness is not a rogue state, that it's an inevitable part of the human condition, and may have blessings of its own.What do you think the key is to using loneliness productively, rather than letting it destroy you? Can self-destruction by loneliness still yield great art?
Understanding how loneliness acts on the brain to warp thinking, making you more paranoid and negative: that was very helpful to me. It meant I could consciously work to challenge it. Once that and the shame are stripped away, what's left is a sense of openness and longing that personally I found inspiring and interesting as well as uncomfortable and alarming. And yes, great art can come out of negative state, for sure. Art doesn't have to report from noble places, does it?'The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone' is out March 1st through Picador. Pre-order it here.Follow Patrick on Twitter