Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing (born 1977) is a British writer who has developed a form of nonfiction that feels genuinely new — part memoir, part cultural history, part biography, part art criticism, all woven together with a novelistic attention to structure and language. Her books use personal experience as an entry point into larger questions about loneliness, addiction, creativity, freedom, and the body, and they do so with an intelligence and emotional honesty that have made her one of the most important anglophone nonfiction writers of the twenty-first century.

Life and Career

Laing was born in Croydon, Surrey, and grew up in an unconventional household — her mother left Laing’s father for a woman when Laing was young, and the family’s subsequent peripatetic, sometimes precarious life informs the emotional landscape of her work. She studied English at the University of Sussex and has worked as a critic, contributing to The Guardian, The Observer, Frieze, and other publications.

Her first book, To the River (2011), was an account of walking the length of the River Ouse in Sussex — the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned — and it established Laing’s method of braiding personal narrative with literary and historical digression. The book is a psychogeography in the tradition of W.G. Sebald and Robert Macfarlane, but with a distinctly feminine sensibility.

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2013) examined the relationship between alcoholism and creativity through six American writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver. The book is not a clinical study of addiction but a humane, beautifully written inquiry into why some of the most gifted writers of the century were also the most self-destructive. Laing’s own experience of growing up with an alcoholic parent gives the book its emotional center.

The Lonely City

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016) is Laing’s finest achievement. Written during a period of intense loneliness after moving to New York City, the book uses the lives and work of artists — Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz — to explore loneliness as both a personal affliction and a cultural phenomenon. The chapter on Wojnarowicz and the AIDS crisis is devastating. The chapter on Darger and his isolate artistic universe is uncanny. The book manages to be both intellectually rigorous and emotionally raw, which is its great distinction.

Later Work

Crudo (2018) was an experimental novel — a fictionalized account of a summer written in near-real-time, with the narrator identified as Kathy Acker (though the experiences are Laing’s own). Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020) collected her criticism and essays. Everybody: A Book About Freedom (2021) examined the politics of the body through the lives of Wilhelm Reich, Susan Sontag, Nina Simone, Malcolm X, and others — ambitious but somewhat diffuse.

Key Works

• The Trip to Echo Spring (2013)
• The Lonely City (2016)
• Funny Weather (2020)
• Everybody (2021)

Collecting Laing

The Lonely City first edition (Canongate UK, 2016 / Picador US, 2016) is the key collectible — signed copies bring $50–$150. The Trip to Echo Spring first edition (Canongate, 2013) signed is $40–$100. Laing signs at events and literary festivals, particularly in the UK. Her readership has grown steadily, and The Lonely City has entered the cultural canon as a reference point for writing about loneliness and art. UK first editions (Canongate) are generally preferred over US editions by collectors. Crudo (Picador, 2018) had a smaller audience but is interesting bibliographically as her only novel.