When I moved to New York in my 20s, I understood loneliness in a different way. I had a few friends there, but nowhere near enough to populate a life. They were already busy and fulfilled before I came, and my endless availability was far from mirrored. I spent many evenings alone, writing – and sometimes that was fine, but often it wasn’t. Until then, I’d believed myself content in my own company, but it took that year in New York to teach me the humbling truth that I was content in my own company only when it was by choice. There’s the romance of solitude and then there’s the shame of loneliness – the former, chosen; the latter, involuntary and stigmatised.
Twenty years later, I now know loneliness ebbs and flows for all of us across a lifetime – whether it’s the loneliness of heartache or political angst, divorce or miscarriage or an empty nest. We should set aside its stigma, but it’s sometimes harder to set loneliness itself aside. It’s why I wrote Welcome To Glorious Tuga and its sequel, Island Calling; I created my own happy place – a tropical island where community and human connection were primary values. No one on Tuga need ever be lonely. I wanted the series to offer a world of hope, of connection, of lives so closely interwoven that the support network was unquestioned and unbreakable. I wanted Tuga to be a place of refuge from troubled times. For these are the novels I treasure most – complete worlds into which I can slip entirely, to lose and find myself.
The tales in A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan are of seemingly disparate lives but are, in fact, interlinked like Olympic rings, and their clever and often unexpected interconnectedness pulls the reader into a reality so vivid that she feels herself a part of it. Characters suffer or trip up, make millions or make catastrophic mistakes, each learning what it is to be human and to live, in and around and about one another, in the world.
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Olivia Laing is a genius and The Lonely City is one of their best. Inspired by a similar period of solitude to mine in New York, Laing investigates the lives of some of the city’s artists and interrogates the very meaning and uses of loneliness itself.
Canongate Books The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
Then there’s the immersive solace of The Cazalet Chronicles quintet by Elizabeth Jane Howard. A vast, sprawling family in a huge house; it doesn’t take many chapters to feel oneself a Cazalet, pouring a martini and listening to wartime dispatches on the wireless. Their stiff upper lips make honest conversation impossible, but they support one another without question.
There’s every possibility that Three Days In June by Anne Tyler is the perfect novel. Slim and elegant, this deceptively simple account of a daughter’s wedding is a study of vulnerability and hope. Spiky, defensive Gail wouldn’t say she’s lonely, but we hurt for her and the great courage it takes for her (and any of us) to allow others in. It’s a testament to hope and to seizing upon second, third or even last chances.
Ideas Of Heaven by Joan Silber is another ring of stories – each one a lifetime. Some of Silber’s characters are desperately lonely, but as she twines them each together, one around the next, she leaves her reader with something beautiful – a flower crown of interwoven human lives.
Island Calling (Chatto & Windus) by Francesca Segal is out on 19 June
