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laumauflau's review against another edition
Too full of itself. Reminds me of the character Scott from Trying.
hoggman's review against another edition
5.0
absolutely fantastic. it turned out to be not simply a book about loneliness in cities, but loneliness and art in big cities, and how queerness affects every aspect. 10/10
blueberrybanana's review
informative
reflective
sad
4.5
Well written, beautiful book abt loneliness and artists who embody it.
buttercup7's review
4.0
Really enjoyed! Wish I had to read when I was so lonely and sad in Montreal. It’s interesting to think of loneliness from a collective and artistic perspective because it naturally seems so isolating.
unintendeadly's review against another edition
2.0
بدأت هذا الكتاب متوقعةً سيرة ذاتية -لذُكر ذلك في أوائل صفحات الكتاب- للكاتبة عن الوحدة التي تطورت معها خلال لحظات حياتها سابقًا حتى وصولها إلى مدينة نيويورك، التي أشارت إليها بـ"المدينة الوحيدة". تشير الكاتبة بشكل أساسي خلال الفصول المتعددة إلى تجربتها في الانغمار بالفن والتماس سير حيوات عدة فنانين بغرض التخفيف من حدّة ألم الوحدة. كان الكتاب مثريًا وآسرًا في نصفه الأول لكنه فقدني في نصفه الآخر؛ الكثير من سيرة فناني نيويورك وحياتهم والقليل من الوحدة -التي كان من المفترض أن تكون المحور الرئيس للكتاب-. ربّما كان الكتاب جيدًا في مجمله لكنه لم يناسبني فحسب، أو ربّما لست وحيدة كفاية حتى أستطيع الانتماء لمحتوى الكتاب بالشكل الكافي. في الأخير، شعرت في لحظات كثيرة أن الكاتبة كانت تكتب عن كل شيءٍ عدا الوحدة.
wrycounsel's review
1.0
Almost all the other nonfiction books included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 had waitlists at my library of more than 50 people each, but this was immediately available, and that should have been a hint.
What a tiresome silly person the author is, for one. She's a straight woman who, because her mother is a lesbian, claims an identity (a gay boy in a straight woman's body) which I found supremely irritating. What exactly does that mean? To not put too fine a point on it, if she has vaginal intercourse with men then she can't possibly be 'like' a gay boy. Olivia Laing had a lover invite her to live with him in NYC, and then he rejected her outright (total cad) but instead of pulling herself together she goes to make herself miserable in a miserable apartment for six months in that city, where she knows nobody. Oh the First World, White Privilege that she doesn't see - she has friends who can just give her a whole apartment to live in rent free (you have to be rich to know and be trusted by rich people), she has a passport (British) and an ethnicity (white) which allows her to just "land" in New York City and not have to hide from Dept of Homeland Security or fall into the hell of undocumented, unprotected labor. And from this, she writes a book about how lonely she feels. "Lonely" is not what that feeling is, lady.
Much of this book is lazy and a slog to get through, like reading a college student's cranked-out end-of-semester thesis. More than half of it consists of not very well written summaries of much better books and documentaries - the Hoopers documentary, the Andy Warhol diaries, SCUM Manifesto, "How to Survive a Plague" - the last three of which I've read. She manages to leach out all the zest out of these and flattens them out. The spectacle of a straight woman who moreover is celibate writing longingly and wistfully about the pre-AIDS era of gay men engaging in unsafe sex in Time Square is very embarassing. I felt very ashamed for her, in the same way I find the white descendants attributing and making up the 'spirituality' and 'connection to the Earth' qualities to the Native American tribes (which surely had to all have been different, have politics, have disputes?) that their ancestors all decimated, one person at a time. She also imagines herself as one of the bohemians(?) and roues who 'enjoyed' the seedy Times Sq and never ever the prostitutes or the gogo girls standing in the windows. Ridiculously, Laing sweeps drug addicts, runaways, the sexually exploited and the middle and upper middle class voyeurs and exploiters as coming into some sort of 'authentic human contact' with each other, each equally contributing to the 'healthy variety' of a city. This wilful avoidance of the impact that misogyny has on women's sexuality made me wonder if Laing was just a bitchy woman who didn't want to empathize with other, less privileged women. She'd prefer to be a 'gay boy in a woman's body' than just a 'woman' so she can ignore the sexualized danger and murder and violence that women suffered in the 'sleazy' Time Sq and those XXX movies for which she has a strangely untimely and bizarre nostalgia.
Laing fantasizes that gay men, living in terrible rundown tenements taking terrible rundown subways to Times Square were ultra' free' and living in a utopia of sexual freedom. This ignores the homophobic violence and oppression those men were subject to, for one, and moreover ignores the very real gay people who fought and won the right to enter into monogamous, state-recognized marriages in which they can raise up 2.5 children. That doesn't fit her masturbatory fantasy of being some free, other version of herself.
This is a spoiled privileged person who didn't make the most of the extraordinary privilege and opportunities she can take for granted, who then takes the skins of those who actually suffered - AIDS activists, Billy Holiday, women artists whose works were gratuitously destroyed by museums because they were women - and tries them on so she can 'feel' something, all purely for lack of something better to do.
Why did I finish it? I was so consumed with irritation that I wanted to see how she was going to end this book.
What a tiresome silly person the author is, for one. She's a straight woman who, because her mother is a lesbian, claims an identity (a gay boy in a straight woman's body) which I found supremely irritating. What exactly does that mean? To not put too fine a point on it, if she has vaginal intercourse with men then she can't possibly be 'like' a gay boy. Olivia Laing had a lover invite her to live with him in NYC, and then he rejected her outright (total cad) but instead of pulling herself together she goes to make herself miserable in a miserable apartment for six months in that city, where she knows nobody. Oh the First World, White Privilege that she doesn't see - she has friends who can just give her a whole apartment to live in rent free (you have to be rich to know and be trusted by rich people), she has a passport (British) and an ethnicity (white) which allows her to just "land" in New York City and not have to hide from Dept of Homeland Security or fall into the hell of undocumented, unprotected labor. And from this, she writes a book about how lonely she feels. "Lonely" is not what that feeling is, lady.
Much of this book is lazy and a slog to get through, like reading a college student's cranked-out end-of-semester thesis. More than half of it consists of not very well written summaries of much better books and documentaries - the Hoopers documentary, the Andy Warhol diaries, SCUM Manifesto, "How to Survive a Plague" - the last three of which I've read. She manages to leach out all the zest out of these and flattens them out. The spectacle of a straight woman who moreover is celibate writing longingly and wistfully about the pre-AIDS era of gay men engaging in unsafe sex in Time Square is very embarassing. I felt very ashamed for her, in the same way I find the white descendants attributing and making up the 'spirituality' and 'connection to the Earth' qualities to the Native American tribes (which surely had to all have been different, have politics, have disputes?) that their ancestors all decimated, one person at a time. She also imagines herself as one of the bohemians(?) and roues who 'enjoyed' the seedy Times Sq and never ever the prostitutes or the gogo girls standing in the windows. Ridiculously, Laing sweeps drug addicts, runaways, the sexually exploited and the middle and upper middle class voyeurs and exploiters as coming into some sort of 'authentic human contact' with each other, each equally contributing to the 'healthy variety' of a city. This wilful avoidance of the impact that misogyny has on women's sexuality made me wonder if Laing was just a bitchy woman who didn't want to empathize with other, less privileged women. She'd prefer to be a 'gay boy in a woman's body' than just a 'woman' so she can ignore the sexualized danger and murder and violence that women suffered in the 'sleazy' Time Sq and those XXX movies for which she has a strangely untimely and bizarre nostalgia.
Laing fantasizes that gay men, living in terrible rundown tenements taking terrible rundown subways to Times Square were ultra' free' and living in a utopia of sexual freedom. This ignores the homophobic violence and oppression those men were subject to, for one, and moreover ignores the very real gay people who fought and won the right to enter into monogamous, state-recognized marriages in which they can raise up 2.5 children. That doesn't fit her masturbatory fantasy of being some free, other version of herself.
This is a spoiled privileged person who didn't make the most of the extraordinary privilege and opportunities she can take for granted, who then takes the skins of those who actually suffered - AIDS activists, Billy Holiday, women artists whose works were gratuitously destroyed by museums because they were women - and tries them on so she can 'feel' something, all purely for lack of something better to do.
Why did I finish it? I was so consumed with irritation that I wanted to see how she was going to end this book.