I never want to write the same book twice. Over the years I’ve written about loneliness and landscape, alcoholism, embodiment, art and freedom. I write about the complicated and sometimes frightening world in which we live, and I’ve found that to do so requires a supple new kind of form. My books refuse category. They shift between memoir and history, criticism, psychoanalysis, biography. They’re political. They often include travel writing – things happen, after all, in physical places. I also move freely between the personal and the objective. I often write about traumatic subjects, and it has felt important to me both to acknowledge my own connection to the subject, as well as to set myself aside and to voyage very deeply into other times and other lives.
My last three non-fiction books share a particularly close connection. The Lonely City is about the purgatory of loneliness, the frozen state of alienation and isolation epitomised by the twenty-first century city. Everybody charts the hell of embodiment, the horror of being trapped in a body that is subject to prejudice, violence, illness and death. And my new book, The Garden Against Time, investigates the fertile and sometimes dangerous dream of paradise of earth and the long struggle to make that paradise shared.
What is Olivia Laing's latest book?
Out now, The Garden Against Time is Olivia Laing’s latest book.
Olivia Laing's novel
Olivia Laing's non-fiction books
‘We're so often told that art can't really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others.’