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tea_bunny's review
5.0
Such a way with words and articulating the inner being. Definitely will be thinking about the collective experience that is loneliness and how it is part of human embodiment.
frenzusca's review against another edition
Really good style of writing but…really dry. It’s less biography or her own stories on loneliness and more art history re loneliness. Additionally, it would have been amazing to include a picture of the paintings that are mentioned in detail…
mina's review
Was a bit too biographical and would perhaps have been more engaging/insightful if she injected more of her own experience/analysis. I guess I was expecting a memoir when I shouldn’t have been.
wicked_sassy's review
5.0
"I hadn't experienced anything like the violence of David [Wojnarowicz]'s childhood, but I knew what it was like to feel unsafe, to pass through chaotic and frightening scenes; to have to find a way through chaotic and frightening scenes; to have to find a way of coping with a simmering sense of fear and rage." p. 106
"All women are subject to that gaze, subject to having it applied or withheld. I'd been brought up by lesbians, I hadn't been indoctrinated in anything, but lately I'd begun to feel almost cowed by its power. If I was to itemize my loneliness, to categorize its component parts, I would have to admit that some of it at least was to do with anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable, and that lodged more deeply beneath that was the growing acknowledgment that in addition to never being able to quite escape the expectations of gender, I was not at all comfortable in the gender box to which I'd been assigned. Was it that the box was too small, with its preposterous expectations of what women are, or was it that I didn't fit? p. 125
"It was increasingly easy to see how people ended up vanishing in cities, disappearing in plain sight, retreating into their apartments because of sickness or bereavement, mental illness or the persistent, unbearable burden of sadness and shyness, of not knowing how to impress themselves into the world. I was getting a taste of it, all right, but what in earth would it be like to live the whole of your life like this, occupying the blind spot in other people's existences, their noisy intimacies?" p. 136
"Connection, attachment, love: those increasingly imperilled possibilities." p. 201
"The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone." p. 227
"I think the salient point about the new world we've been drifting into is that all the walls are falling down, everything blurring into everyone else. In this atmosphere of perpetual contact, perpetual salience, intimacy falters." p. 241
"There are so many things are can't do. It can't bring the dead back to life, it can't mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other's lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly." p. 280
"There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings--depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage--are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails." p. 280-281
"All women are subject to that gaze, subject to having it applied or withheld. I'd been brought up by lesbians, I hadn't been indoctrinated in anything, but lately I'd begun to feel almost cowed by its power. If I was to itemize my loneliness, to categorize its component parts, I would have to admit that some of it at least was to do with anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable, and that lodged more deeply beneath that was the growing acknowledgment that in addition to never being able to quite escape the expectations of gender, I was not at all comfortable in the gender box to which I'd been assigned. Was it that the box was too small, with its preposterous expectations of what women are, or was it that I didn't fit? p. 125
"It was increasingly easy to see how people ended up vanishing in cities, disappearing in plain sight, retreating into their apartments because of sickness or bereavement, mental illness or the persistent, unbearable burden of sadness and shyness, of not knowing how to impress themselves into the world. I was getting a taste of it, all right, but what in earth would it be like to live the whole of your life like this, occupying the blind spot in other people's existences, their noisy intimacies?" p. 136
"Connection, attachment, love: those increasingly imperilled possibilities." p. 201
"The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone." p. 227
"I think the salient point about the new world we've been drifting into is that all the walls are falling down, everything blurring into everyone else. In this atmosphere of perpetual contact, perpetual salience, intimacy falters." p. 241
"There are so many things are can't do. It can't bring the dead back to life, it can't mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other's lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly." p. 280
"There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings--depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage--are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails." p. 280-281