A beautiful blend of memoir, art analysis and sociological study, Laing looks at the experience of loneliness from her personal experience of being completely alone in New York for a period of time and at artists' expressions of loneliness: Edward Hopper & Andy Warhol, as well as outsider artists David Wojnarowicz & Henry Darger. Throughout was a lovely meditation on the experience of loneliness, which is not the same as simply being alone.

Laing makes so many noteworthy observations, but here is one:
"There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenizing, 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 attendent grief and frustration that entails."

She says, "the way that I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or falling in love, but rather by ... slowly absorbing ... the fact that loneliness, longing does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive."