Before Covid, I was already a bit lonely: unpartnered, living on my own, plugging away at a notoriously solitary line of work as an adjunct professor and still feeling new to Los Angeles, a city known for its isolating energy. Yet a strange thing happened once I wasn’t allowed to see people: I liked it. Where before I’d pined for company, now I luxuriated in solitude like a hot bath during a New England winter because seeping into my consciousness was an awareness of the incongruities between me and the activities of my life, which I imagine only happened because I was so starkly separated from them.
I’ve been interested in loneliness as a subject of study because I exist at a time when governments are legislating to address it. But quarantine got me thinking about the ways I’ve had to reconfigure my personality in order to engage with some people and the culture at large, in other words, the ways I’ve felt separated from myself.
In 2022, I couldn’t help but read books through this lens. Where’s loneliness in these pages? What separates these characters from who they are?
My first book of the year was a revisit to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, which I’d assigned in class. In the novel, 14-year-old John Grimes undergoes a transformative religious experience during a church visit and we follow him and his family as they reckon with John’s spiritual crisis and their own personal demons. The book spans decades, dipping into the characters’ backstories and confronting them with the ways piety and sin battle for their souls alongside the psychically disfiguring forces of racism and familial trauma.
John’s battle isn’t simply resistance to religion or domineering family members; to my mind, he resists having to separate from the sexual impulses and philosophical curiosities that are as meaningful to him as God and family. How does he merge those conflicting influences so he can inhabit a cohesive self while still residing comfortably in the life he knows? As Baldwin later wrote in Nobody Knows My Name, “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”
This notion of loss—how it can both test and embolden our identities—reverberates throughout the essays in editor Natalie Eve Garrett’s The Lonely Stories. I read it at the beginning of the year when nourishing solitude had once again been displaced by plain old loneliness, and I needed to know I wasn’t the only one feeling it. But in this book, loneliness isn’t only about the absence of other people. Aja Gabel carries the secret of her pregnancy, for fear of miscarriage, which separates her from her loved ones and thrusts her into a contemplation of “the loneliness of having a woman’s body.” In choosing not to write in her native language, Yiyun Lee feels separation from her culture though she also feels herself becoming someone new.
Maybe this is what can make solitude so precious, the way it shows us what’s possible. As a single woman, Maggie Shipstead treasures the adventures she places in the gap between herself and where a romantic partner might be, while happily married Helena Fitzgerald prefers sleeping by herself, in part, because she can recover what she occasionally misses as one half of a couple.
“Living alone as a woman,” she writes, “takes on outsize significance because it offers the right to a full self.”
I’d been wanting to read Dalia Azim’s Country of Origin and Monica West’s Revival Season so I was thrilled to learn I’d be in conversation with the authors during the tour for my debut; I could move their books to the top of the stack. Azim’s novel, about a young woman who flees the tumult of her native Egypt with the soldier she falls for, is richly crafted with the kind of detail that steeps the reader in time and place, while also making us feel the emotional weight of each character’s decisions.
In West’s novel, the daughter of a preacher witnesses a horrific act committed by her father, which she can’t tell anyone. Like John Grimes, her identity has been built around family and religion, so when she starts to realize she might share her father’s healing powers, she has another secret to carry. In both novels, the characters have a choice between creating authentic identities and more satisfying lives, or staying attached to tribe so as not to be alone. While reading both books, I felt the pull toward either side, just as I often feel in life.
In Big Girl, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s Malaya lives in a body she thinks mirrors “the shape of a potato.” Her mother and grandmother pressure her to diet and present herself in more traditionally feminine ways, thus, she experiences a kind of separation from her body and its appetites, especially once she gets romantic crushes. I loved Malaya because I love stories about girls pushing back against societal expectations. This novel is about so many things—gentrification, intergenerational trauma, Black womanhood, love in all forms—but it’s Sullivan’s heart-rending observations about her character’s sense of disconnect in her body that kept a lump in my throat.
“It wasn’t touch that she wanted,” Sullivan writes about Malaya’s sexual interlude with a boy. “It was acknowledgement—evidence that she was there, eligible for touch, for desire.”
Frida, the protagonist in Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, is probably the most isolated of all the characters I read this year. Divorced from a husband who now lives with a soul-crushingly attractive woman and tormented by the couple next door whose “luxurious moans make her lonelier than she is already,” Frida has her child taken away by the state after leaving her alone for a short time. She must attend school to learn the proper techniques of mothering and exorcise herself of the demons and bad habits that make her a “narcissist” incapable of caring for a child. The book is a master class in character development, particularly in creating characters who are complicated and not always relatable or likeable, but profoundly compelling. It also achieves the sweet spot for readers: it’s unputdownable and beautifully written.
Motherhood is a primary focus of examination, particularly how society piles expectations and duties on women then punishes them when they show even a flicker of frustration. But one of the ironies of the story is that Frida’s daughter has been taken away from her because she sought a moment of solitude. In a way, motherhood has separated Frida from key parts of herself and what she likes about living, so she feels “a sudden pleasure” when she gives herself a brief respite. The state punishes her for trying to bridge this gap by separating her from her child, thus provoking a more poignant sense of loss. Frida can’t win and her plight got me wondering: is every story, perhaps like life itself, an endless series of connections and losses? Are we always trying to bridge some separation?
This year, I also adored Steve Almond’s All the Secrets of the World—the page-turner of the year for me—and Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book. Like all of the novels I loved this year, these two featured characters separated from something or someone important to them, especially in Mott’s book where the main character is so alienated from himself that he disassociates. Of course, all of these books are about more than loneliness or separation, and if I were to read them again next year, I’d likely discover something new.
The last half of 2022 has been filled with new and renewed friendships, and I couldn’t be happier. As the year closes, I’m feeling more connected, more authentically attached, and better in touch with myself. I have these writers to thank for helping get me here.
