What do you think?
Rate this book
The Lonely Stories
A collection of essays about the joys and struggles of being alone by 22 literary writers including: Lev Grossman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lena Dunham, Jesmyn Ward, Yiyun Li, and Anthony Doerr.
If you’re feeling lonely or if you’ve ever felt unseen, if you’re emboldened by solitude or secretly longing for it: Welcome to The Lonely Stories. This cathartic collection of personal essays illuminates what the experience of being alone is like for all of us. Some of these stories are heartbreaking, such as Jesmyn Ward’s reckoning with the loss of her husband, Imani Perry’s confrontation with chronic illness, and Dina Nayeri’s reflection on immigrating to a foreign country. Others are witty, such as Lev Grossman’s rueful tale of heading to the woods alone or Anthony Doerr’s struggles with internet addiction. Still others celebrate solitude and the kind of clarity it can bring about, such as Claire Dederer’s journey toward sobriety and Lidia Yuknavitch’s sensual look at women and desire. Thoughtful and ultimately affirming, The Lonely Stories explores emotions that so often go undiscussed, and lets us all know that we’re not alone.
If you’re feeling lonely or if you’ve ever felt unseen, if you’re emboldened by solitude or secretly longing for it: Welcome to The Lonely Stories. This cathartic collection of personal essays illuminates what the experience of being alone is like for all of us. Some of these stories are heartbreaking, such as Jesmyn Ward’s reckoning with the loss of her husband, Imani Perry’s confrontation with chronic illness, and Dina Nayeri’s reflection on immigrating to a foreign country. Others are witty, such as Lev Grossman’s rueful tale of heading to the woods alone or Anthony Doerr’s struggles with internet addiction. Still others celebrate solitude and the kind of clarity it can bring about, such as Claire Dederer’s journey toward sobriety and Lidia Yuknavitch’s sensual look at women and desire. Thoughtful and ultimately affirming, The Lonely Stories explores emotions that so often go undiscussed, and lets us all know that we’re not alone.
252 pages, Paperback
First published April 19, 2022
262 people are currently reading
16787 people want to read
About the author
Natalie Eve Garrett
3 books46 followersNatalie Eve Garrett is an artist and a writer. She's the editor of THE LONELY STORIES, a cathartic collection of personal essays from 22 celebrated writers about the joys and struggles of being alone, out now from Catapult. She's also the editor of EAT JOY (Catapult, 2019), a collection of stories exploring how food can help us cope in dark times, and THE ARTISTS' AND WRITERS' COOKBOOK (pH Books, 2016), a collection of stories with recipes. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, Natalie lives with her husband, two children, and their puppy, Zephyr, in a little town near DC, along the Potomac River.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 249 reviews
April 23, 2026
When I invited people, I typically would offer up various prompts. I definitely made it clear from the beginning that I was interested in [pieces] that explored the ways in which alone time can be maddening and isolating and painful, but also pieces that explored the ways in which alone time can be a thrill, or a joy, or something that you crave but can’t access, which I think a lot of people also experienced during the pandemic. There was this simultaneous excess of loneliness and then absence of solitude, which is something I contemplated a lot. I feel like one thing I learned from making the book—but after it had already been printed, of course—is that our longing for solitude is also another kind of loneliness. I think it relates to my experience of the pandemic, and probably a lot of people’s experience of the pandemic. There was so much loneliness, but also the loneliness of not having solitude. Like, I have kids at home, and solitude is something that I crave. It’s like loneliness from oneself. A lack of connection to yourself. - from the CityLit interview------------------------------------
We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. - Orson WellesWelles was wrong. No one is born alone. We all emerge from mothers. Even so-called “test-tube” babies gestate in and emerge from a woman. Dying alone is a lot easier to manage, particularly when the passing occurs away from medical care. But, for most of us, even in the age of COVID, there are people likely to be in attendance, even if they are not necessarily the people one might have preferred. We are social creatures from birth. That said, I do take Welles’ point that we are isolated bits of consciousness trapped inside a meat sack.
Natalie Eve Garrett - image from her site
We are the only true witnesses to our lives, present for every moment, every experience, every feeling. Even our closest friend(s), lover(s), shrink(s) or interrogator(s) can only know a sliver of the totality of us. So what? Is this something we require? Does this mean that we are doomed to aloneness forever? The best we can do to share that self with others is to select subsets, parts of ourselves, immediate needs, likes, reactions, interests, artistic expressions, and feelings to share, to connect our solo consciousness with the greater humanity within which we live, to demand responses, connections back, human links. What if that desirable steady-state of exchange is disrupted, or never settles in at all, for reasons internal or external? CAN ANYONE OUT THERE HEAR ME?
But we do have ways of connecting. Communication, if we can muster that. Words, gestures touch, other non-verbal modalities. We are largely telepaths, communicating our consciousness to others through the magic of sight and sound. No station-to station hard wires required. And yet, even given this miracle within us, we can, and often do, experience (suffer from) loneliness. Is loneliness a failure of communication, a reaction to external stimuli (rejection), a mechanism, like pain, that tells us that something needs attending to, or something else entirely? Maybe being lonely is just a garden variety human feeling that we all have from time to time, but that some have in dangerous abundance, in a way like cell growth and replication, which is desirable, versus out-of-control cell growth, which is cancer.
In The Lonely Stories, editor Natalie Eve Garrett has called together twenty-two writers of note for their lonely stories, memoir items, not fiction. The quote at top tells us that she was interested in looking at a few things; alone time as burden, blessing, or out of reach, longing for solitude, and feeling isolated in our lives among others. We learn more in that CityLit interview:
Even though it’s called The Lonely Stories, I definitely wanted it to encompass facets and permutations of being alone, including joy in solitude, how solitude can be replenishing and healing. So it felt like maybe sometimes I nudged things more in one direction or another and it was really important to me that the book tease out the distinction between the two, because loneliness is being defined as a lack, whereas solitude is kind of the art of feeling at home with oneself. There’s a quote for me that a friend reminded me of, that loneliness is a poverty of self and solitude is a richness of self. I feel that really nicely addresses the paradox of how being alone can be both maddening and joyful.The tales told here cover a range. All of these stories, none longer than eighteen pages, present complexity. No simple woe is me, I’m feeling bad, will be found here. Sure, there is a bit of surviving the breakup of relationships, licking wounds, but there are universal concerns, at the very least concerns that very many of us share.
Megan Giddings writes about self-empowerment, allowing herself to function, to survive when alone, whether in a hostile social world or a physically perilous situation. Several writers tell of feeling isolated, lonely and alone in relationships. Imani Perry writes of the singular loneliness of the hospital room, and of how many of those offering help do so out of social obligation, without substantive intent or understanding. Maggie Shipstead writes of the up and down sides to experiencing the beauty of nature while alone. ( The natural beauty I saw while walking my dog—the frozen ponds and snowy beaches, the tender pale sunsets over whitecapped ocean—sometimes felt irrelevant, even discouraging, without anyone else to stand there with me and say something like, Wow, so pretty) She and others write about the joys of being alone. Sometimes coping with loneliness requires some creativity. One writer tells of concocting imaginary helpers to beat back the night. COVID figures in some stories, one in a particularly dramatic way. Of course, one can choose to be alone and find that it is not quite what one had hoped for. Lev Grossman’s story of setting out to make his fortune as a writer was hilarious, and hit very close to home. ( I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at twenty-two or how little I’d thought about what I was doing.) Of course choosing to be alone works out just fine for Helena Fitzgerald and Melissa Febos. A question is raised; Can succeeding at aloneness spoil you for togetherness?
There are stories that will make you weep, stories that will make you laugh out loud, stories that will make you think, and stories that will make you feel. There are stories that deal with racism, alcoholism, marriage, rejection by one’s only parent, the loss of one’s parents to age and/or dementia. Three writers tell of the experience of immigration, one of multiple immigrations, and how being the outsider can stoke the engines of loneliness to a high intensity.
One of the most powerful pieces here is Yiyun Li’s story of public and private language. (Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. ) Anthony Doerr goes from a consideration of his on-line addiction to a concern about whether he actually exists at all. We think of writing as a solitary undertaking, yet some of the stories here point to writing as a way to create connections with other people.
One take on dream interpretation is that every person, every character in a dream is some manifestation of yourself. The experience of reading The Lonely Stories was a bit like that for me. In so many of the tales I could see myself in the experience of the story-tellers. I imagine that will be the case for many of you as well.
An aspect of this book that was, and probably should not have been surprising, (given the quality of the writers. Really good writing often has this effect.) was that I felt prompted to recall personal memories of loneliness, and it took some effort to turn that spigot off after only a dozen. I could have easily made this review a platform for my lonely stories, which would have been a disservice. (What if I alternate one of mine with one of theirs? went my inner gremlins. Wisdom won out. You have been spared.) It is the sort of book that would serve well as a springboard for a writing class. Everyone has felt lonely, if not all the time, then in some particular moments or parts of our lives. How about you tell of a time when you were lonely? The tales here will prompt you to think about a time, or many times when experiences, when feelings you had might fit quite nicely into a collection like this.
One thing I wished for was more of a look at definitions, where loneliness ends and being alone begins, for example. Where is the line between solitude and isolation? Where does the need to communicate run into a need for privacy? A three-dimension spectrum of solitude (not to be confused with the Fortress of Solitude) might be an interesting way to visualize aloneness, with the X-axis reflecting the degree of solitude, measured, I guess, in interactions per day in person or via comms, the Y-Axis indicating how much personal choice is involved (probably not much for a prisoner, some, for most people, more for a single person of means) and the Z-axis reflecting how a person feels about their XY intersection, with end-points at going insane and I’m good. Add color if a fourth dimension is needed. But maybe that would be in a psychology book, and not a memoir collection, so fine, whatever. There was an opportunity missed here in the selection of writers. Loneliness is a particular factor with older people, yet the oldest (that I could determine from simple Google searching) contributor is 60. Not a single fully vested Social Security recipient in the bunch, at least as far as I could tell.
Bottom line is that, while the title of this book may suggest it could be a downer, The Lonely Stories is anything but. It not only connects on an emotional level, but offers a wide range of insight into the human condition. You will laugh and cry, and maybe feel prompted to consider loneliness, or lonely times in your own experience. One thing is for certain. However you react to this book, you will not be alone in that reaction.
It’s the worst loneliness, I think, the loneliness we feel among those we feel we should be most like. Our tribe turns out not to be quite our tribe.
Review posted – April 29, 2022
Publication date – April 19, 2022
I received an ARE of The Lonely Stories from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. I felt less alone while reading the book and writing about it.
This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages
Interviews
-----Catapult - Natalie Eve Garrett Wants Us to Feel Loneliness Without Shame by Tajja Isen
-----CityLit Project - Navigating Solitude with Kristen Radtke, Natalie Eve Garrett, & Nguyen Koi Nguyen
Songs/Music
-----Roy Orbison - Only the Lonely
-----Paul Anka - I’m Just a lonely Boy
-----B.J. Thomas - I’m So lonely I Could Die
-----Charlie Haden - Lonely Town
-----Bobby Vinton - Mr. Lonely
-----Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart
-----Gilbert o’Sullivan - Alone Again
-----Carousel (the film) – Rogers & Hammerstein – Claramae Turner - You’ll Never Walk Alone
-----Les Miserables – Lea Salonga (concert performance) - On My Own
Items of Interest
-----Garbo - ”I want to be alone”
-----Roots of Loneliness - Solitude Vs. Loneliness: How To Be Alone Without Feeling Lonely by Saprina Panday
-----The loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe – complete text
----- Frontiers in genetics - Long-Term Impact of Social Isolation and Molecular Underpinnings
June 23, 2022
“As someone who has been an immigrant twice, I have spent most of my life feeling lonely. In fact, I still do. I often feel slightly out of step with everyone else around me, translating different versions of myself back and forth. This is a part of the price of being a foreigner. We are pulled by language, culture, the enormous mass of our invisible pasts that both weigh us down and give us our gravitas.”
It's always hard to rate collections because there are some stories I'll love and others that will leave me uninterested. In The Lonely Stories edited by Natalie Eve Garrett, I enjoyed almost each story on loneliness as they vary from narrations about the pandemic, FOMO, solo travel, racism, hospital stays, being a nonnative speaker in a foreign country, and even relationships.
My favorites include:
- To Speak is to Blunder but I Venture by Yiyun Li
- A Strange and Difficult Joy by Helena Fitzgerald
- The Body Secret by Aja Gabel
- The Perpetual Foreigner by Jean Kwok
- Letting Go by Maya Shanbhag Lang
- At the Horizon by Maggie Shipstead
- Ward by Imani Perry
- Mother-Wit by Jeffery Renard Allen
- Alone Time by Lena Dunham
- The Woman Who Walked Alone by Amy Shearn
- Notes from the Midpoint of a Celibate Year by Melissa Febos
"I forgot, for a spell, that my own company is more compelling than that of any stranger, and returning to this knowledge feels like a kind of love, like walking straight into the arms of a friend."
It's always hard to rate collections because there are some stories I'll love and others that will leave me uninterested. In The Lonely Stories edited by Natalie Eve Garrett, I enjoyed almost each story on loneliness as they vary from narrations about the pandemic, FOMO, solo travel, racism, hospital stays, being a nonnative speaker in a foreign country, and even relationships.
My favorites include:
- To Speak is to Blunder but I Venture by Yiyun Li
- A Strange and Difficult Joy by Helena Fitzgerald
- The Body Secret by Aja Gabel
”the loneliness of grief was a hard burden to bear”
- The Perpetual Foreigner by Jean Kwok
- Letting Go by Maya Shanbhag Lang
- At the Horizon by Maggie Shipstead
”We are contained within our bodies and minds, and although we can use both to connect with other people, to feel close, that closeness is finite. Maybe the impossibility of perfect togetherness, of perfect understanding, is what makes the search for connection so enticing, the moments of resonance so profound.”
- Ward by Imani Perry
- Mother-Wit by Jeffery Renard Allen
- Alone Time by Lena Dunham
”If I were being didactic I would say that this, this pure and fiery solitude, is the time in which women form themselves-and that a patriarchal society has removed that privilege from us through the threat of eternal loneliness as a penance for the sin of loving yourself.”
- The Woman Who Walked Alone by Amy Shearn
- Notes from the Midpoint of a Celibate Year by Melissa Febos
"I forgot, for a spell, that my own company is more compelling than that of any stranger, and returning to this knowledge feels like a kind of love, like walking straight into the arms of a friend."
July 8, 2022
Didn't make the impact I was hoping for. The connection isn't there. The writing seems abrupt for most stories. Different authors, different stories but the writing all felt the same.
✔️Alone but not lonely but reading about lonely.
✔️Alone but not lonely but reading about lonely.
April 11, 2022
One might imagine that a book about loneliness will explore the ways our increasingly isolated lives cause so much suffering, which is certainly a necessary exploration. What is unexpected and enormously compelling about this essay collection is how it demonstrates that loneliness isn’t always about the absence of people; it’s also about the distances we choose to put between ourselves and places, experiences, or even our true natures (or how those distances sometimes choose us).
The loneliness of keeping secrets, of hiding pain we feel we can’t share, of losing a native language – these are just some of the diverse takes these writers offer on the subject and it’s hard to choose a favorite. Another benefit is that through seeing loneliness in its many forms, lonely readers may feel less so.
Garrett’s collection offers the best of both worlds: phenomenal writing and a welcome adjustment to the way we see an aspect of life. I love this book.
The loneliness of keeping secrets, of hiding pain we feel we can’t share, of losing a native language – these are just some of the diverse takes these writers offer on the subject and it’s hard to choose a favorite. Another benefit is that through seeing loneliness in its many forms, lonely readers may feel less so.
Garrett’s collection offers the best of both worlds: phenomenal writing and a welcome adjustment to the way we see an aspect of life. I love this book.
Read
July 9, 2022Loveee
June 28, 2022
this one is for the lonely bitches out there like me!
March 12, 2026
I loved reading these stories, each with a different perspective on being alone. These are deeply felt narratives by authors who offer their vulnerability to their readers.
1. Brief Important Moments Where I Was the Only Person on Earth by Megan Giddings. I was struck by the idea of being free is to be able to be out alone at night. For example, men may go to the movies alone – but do women?
Powerful quote: “My entire life, I’ve had to remind myself how precious I am to myself. That I deserve to be taken care of, that it is worthwhile for me to be alive, that I am not taking up space.”
2. Javelinas by Claire Dederer. “I stretched out on the living room floor with the high desert sunlight streaming all over me, and the decision to stop drinking happened to me. It was the saddest decision in the world – the decision to stop being alone in that particular way.”
3. Ward by Imani Perry. This story was especially poignant, and I nodded in agreement and understanding many times. I felt that Perry was voicing many of my own experiences when either staying in a hospital or visiting a loved one.
“A hospital room gives loneliness its peak expression.” While you are physically alone, “the comfort of alone is absent. The floor, naked, gleams clean. It reflects nothing. Smallness expands like a funhouse.” Then, there is the constant bustle of noise or conversations right outside that you are not included in but prevent you from fully resting.
A strange thing, which I believe is also true of many waiting rooms: “The television is nakedly honest in a hospital room. It does not suck you into its fantasies. It is a cacophonous box, boring and squawking.”
“We can be “healthy” in deed, and indeed, but even at our heartiest, we are most frail.” This is most apparent when we fall sick and need medical assistance and it is then that we realize just how precious and fragile life is.
“But there are in fact people in this world who maintain the gift of clarity when it comes to kindness. Children have it, usually, but we socialize them out of it.” I’m still pondering this.
“You have children to let them go eventually, hoping they will stay connected to you, but you are not entitled to that.” This sentence held a lot of meaning for me. It is a tremendous and wonderful feeling to be chosen to participate in my adult children’s lives. However, I also know the pain of exclusion, and the longing for connection.
4. Mother-Wit by Jeffery Renard Allen. About his relationship with his mother, Allen writes, “We were aligned. A nation of two.” Then, when his maternal grandmother dies, he learns how closely aligned his mother was with her own mother when she says, “’Now I have no one.’ I did not understand what she meant. Was I not someone? Were we not a nation of two?” His loneliness is palpable and his grief reaches depths of despair.
“Nothing I can do to save myself from the sunken place of grief. ‘Now I have nobody.’”
5. At the Horizon by Maggie Shipstead. This story is about taking the opportunity to go adventuring while you can and not waiting for someone to join you, as it is better to adventure alone than not to adventure at all. I love this passage:
“There are people I love who I wish had experienced these things too, but if I’d waited for them, I wouldn’t have done any of it. We’re told memories are best when they’re shared, but I’m saying sometimes it’s okay to gobble down the world like the most delicious midnight snack, all for you. I’m saying our memories are only ever really our own, anyway. I’m saying: take a trip.”
6. Exodus, 2020 by Emily Raboteau. This story is set during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was fascinating to read of how the neighborhood changes as people move out of the apartment buildings and what happens to those left behind who don’t have the resources to move. They miss the daily conversations, those points of connection when you meet neighbors on the elevator or in the laundry room etc.
One neighbor, while leaving, calls out, “’We’ll see you on the other side.’ He meant this as a kindness, presuming the pandemic’s end and our neighbors’ eventual return. But I was beginning to wonder, what if they never came back?”
7. Maine Man by Lev Grossman. “I was an artist. I was special. I was sparkly. I would walk another. And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: you didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.”
“I spent a lot of time at the library too. Though it turned out that none of the librarians were lonely.”
“You can still be lonely now, but back then it had a different texture to it. It was raw and uncut and feral.”
8. Alone Time by Lena Dunham. “But if I were being honest I’d answer them by saying that my heart could still ache for one home as I returned to myself in another.”
9. To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture by Yiyun Li. “Years ago, when I started writing in English, my husband asked if I understood the implication of the decision.”
“My husband, who writes computer programs, was asking about language. Did I understand what it meant to renounce my mother tongue?”
“One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in and claims understanding and empathy do people call it a tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.”
“It’s the absoluteness of my abandonment of Chinese, undertaken with such determination that it is a kind of suicide.”
“Rarely does a story start where we wish it had or end where we wish it would.”
“There’s so much to give up: hope, freedom, dignity. A private language, however, defies any confinement. Death alone can take it away.”
“Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections.”
10. Am I Still Here? by Anthony Doerr. The first two lines read, “I harbor a dark twin inside. He’s a sun-starved, ropy bastard and he lives somewhere north of my heart.” It’s a clever story about being present in the moment and actively participating in life in real time.
11. A Strange and Difficult Joy by Helena Fitzgerald. This story is about a woman daring to live alone. I loved this description of having the entire bed to yourself: “I sleep with my limbs giddily starfished across as much of the bed as possible, a self-aggrandizing compass reaching for the edges of the map.”
“Woman are the anchors of social labor, the glue pulling the family, and then the community, together with small talk and good manners and social niceties. Living alone as a woman is not just a luxury but a refusal to bend into the shape of patriarchal assumption and expectation.”
“Living alone is a reminder that we can make our bodies antisocial, hoarding our selfishness and our silence. Living alone offers the strange and rich pleasures of the world beyond the social, beyond the social, beyond the structures of home and family.”
12. 75 x 2 by Maile Meloy. The first sentence reads, “My grandparents were married for seventy-five years, which isn’t easy to do.”
“Toward the end, it started to feel like a sociology experiment with a tiny sample, or like two people stuck together in a small and leaking lifeboat.”
This line broke me: “He missed Lou – his companion and his great love, but also his prop and his memory aide, the person he tried hardest for, the one he didn’t want to let down.”
13. The Body Secret by Aja Gabel. This story is about the loneliness of miscarriage.
“He did everything he could, but this particular pain wasn’t communal.”
“How can so many people go through this [miscarriage] and so few communicate what it’s really like?”
“The thing no one told me about pregnancy is that when you are pregnant, you carry a secret, and so you are a secret to yourself. You are also a secret to your partner. You carry this alone. You cannot truly share the pain of growing life, just as you cannot truly share the pain of letting life go.”
“I knew that I had been right: our bodies are our most-kept secrets.”
14. The Perpetual Foreigner by Jean Kwok. Kwok refers to her memories of growing up in Hong Kong as “that small golden patch of sunlight in my life.”
She writes of moving to America and leaving everything behind. “I had left so much back in Hong Kong: my prowess in school, my sparkly gold slippers, my much-admired ability to curse as well as the fishmonger, my afternoons wandering the sunlit streets with my brothers and my fat ginger cat.”
Kwok’s loneliness is visceral: “How can you ease your loneliness when no one knows who you truly are?” And “I had carved myself into slices like a melon and there was no one who saw the entirety of who I was.” She fills this void “with another emotion: ambition.”
I loved that she was “always with [her] nose buried in a library book.”
“It wasn’t until we moved to the Netherlands and I became an immigrant for the second time that I realized how much of our identities are reflected back upon us by other people. These echoes reaffirm who we think we are, for good or for bad.”
“Never having felt truly American, I realize how American I have become.” This is true for me also.
15. The Woman Who Walked Alone by Amy Shearn. This story includes the adventure of Lillian Alling, an Eastern European immigrant who sets out from New York City on foot. It takes her three years to reach her destination of Siberia. Alling was thirty years old when she set out and no-one knows for sure what motivated her to uproot herself and set out on her journey.
Alling would never have been able to afford the fair for a steamer ship on her meagre salary. “Instead she took a bag full of bread and tea, and some maps she’d hand-copied from the New York Public Library and crossed from New York State into Canada. It was Christmas Eve 1926, a brisk time for taking an extended stroll.”
“She always walked alone.”
Amy Shearn wonders, “Maybe I feel lonely because I am never alone.” Further, she writes, “Lillian’s story feeds my wanderlust at a time when my life does not.” Then, explains that she is in “a lonely marriage.” Shearn and her husband do not connect and spend most of their time apart.
She takes action by moving out of the family home into a place on her own. Finding she has time on her hands, Shearn pursues activities that bring her joy; she “read[s] old favorite books that curl up in [her] brain like cats.” Like Lillian, she understands “that the only story that matters is the one you’re living,” and also like Lillian, she feels no compulsion to explain herself or correct other people’s assumptions about her.
16. Part and Apart by Peter Ho Davies. This story begins, “Coventry, England, is a nondescript place, not famous for much – Lady Godiva rode naked through its streets to protest taxes according to medieval legend, and the Luftwaffe bombed it flat in one night in 1940.”
Then, in 1981, something magical happened, and “a Star Trek convention came to town.” Davies attended the convention alone, too ashamed to admit his interest in something considered “aberrant” in the 1980s. Davies writes, “It’s the worst loneliness, I think, the loneliness we feel among those we feel we should be most like, most want to be like. Our tribe turns out to be not quite our tribe.”
“One thing we know about the frontier is that it’s a lonely place.” Think of the vastness of space, it would be easy to feel alone. However, aboard the Starship Enterprise there is a multiracial community we can invest our interest in. We watch television and read books alone, however we are connected to “all those invisible strangers out there who are also watching and reading by themselves.”
Davies concludes that despite his feeling of alienation at the convention, he has learned “that we find companionship not with our own, those like us, but with those others, unlike us, even aliens, with whom all we share is a voyage of loneliness. Which sometimes turns out to be enough.”
17. Letting Go by Maya Shanbhag Lang. The author tells the story of living alongside her mother who has the disease of Alzheimer’s. Lang writes, “If I try to reason with my mother, my time will be squandered.”
Lang describes her mother as “a formidable scientist, a no-nonsense physician, a force of nature.” And asks, “how do we negotiate ambiguous loss? My mother is present but absent. I don’t know who I’m talking to, if I should fight for her, try to pull her back to me.”
She enjoys watching her daughter and her mother interacting at mealtime. “They’re like siblings, whispering to each other, giggling conspiratorially.” However, she experiences loneliness, friends and family have accepted their situation and no longer ask how she is. Her world has shrunk and she writes, “my mother and I are trading places.”
Her daughter has the freedom to accept her grandmother as she is. However, Lang cannot let go of her memory of who her mother was. Lang struggles, initially resisting putting her mother in an assisted living facility, however, when she finally submits, she discovers that at the facility her “mother finds what [she] could not give her: peers, social support, community.”
Meanwhile, Lang writes, “the most oppressive feature of loneliness, [is] the way it limits the imagination, whispering to us that life will never be better, that we are not allowed to envision possibilities. Loneliness chips away at the space we occupy.”
Weeks go by, the wisteria is in bloom, she lifts her face to the lovely blue sky to gaze at its beauty and feel the sun’s warmth. “This is what [her] mother would have wanted for [her], to stand in the light.”
She concludes, “I know now that when we let go, we do not lose – for in the act of letting go, we find ourselves, come back to ourselves, and the reunion is joyous, exceeding what we once dared imagine.”
18. Trading Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. She writes of her father “leaving his country and his family, stripping himself of the reassurance of belonging.” For a long time, Lahiri desired “to belong to a place, either the one her parents came from or America, spread out before us.”
However, “when she became a writer [her] desk became home; there was no need for another. Every story is a foreign territory, which, in the process of writing, is occupied and then abandoned.”
19. On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward. This story begins with the death of her Beloved. After describing his physical attributes she writes, “He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning.” How my heart ached when I read about this simple, yet beautiful, daily act of love, now absent.
Indeed, “the absence of my Beloved echoed in every room of our house.” And “My loss was a tender second skin.”
“As the pandemic settled in and stretched,” Ward works on her new book. She writes at least one sentence per day, sometimes more.
Ward writes of the pervasive inequality in the USA:
“Witness Black people, Indigenous people, so many poor brown people, lying on beds in frigid hospitals, gasping our last breaths with COVID-riddled lungs, rendered flat by undiagnosed underlying conditions, triggered by years of food deserts, stress, and poverty, lives spent snatching sweets so we could eat one delicious morsel, savor some sugar on the tongue, oh Lord, because the flavor of our lives is so often bitter.”
Finally, Ward writes of how a doctor told her that hearing is the last sense to go when someone is dying. I have been told this also.
“When someone is dying, they lose sight and smell and taste and touch. They even forget who they are. But in the end, they hear you.”
20. Reliquary: A Quartet by Lidia Yuknavitch. The gift of an empty hummingbird’s nest is on her desk. Yuknavitch ponders what happened to the owners of the nest. Were they beset by disaster, “or is the absence marked by flight and becoming? Death or life?”
“The empty nest is either a delicate and beautiful artifact from the natural world or a stain, a violence.”
Meanwhile, Yuknavitch is facing an empty nest of her own. She dreads her son going off to college. She writes, “I was mourning my son’s leaving before it ever happened because I carry loss inside my chest where a heart should be. My body is a lifedeath space.” Her daughter died on the same day she was born. She cannot stand to let her son go. Instead, she moves to an alternate location to write and avoids the point of separation.
“There is an alone inside grief, and it is yours, and the alone is both unbearable and simultaneously beautiful. Never let anyone tell you how long your grief should last or what to do with it.”
Finally, Yuknavitch concludes that “the emptiness of the nest is like my mother-gut, that space that held grief and death and life and joy, now filled with fat and thriving stories.”
21. The Ugly Corner by Dina Nayeri. Nayeri describes her family home as having “a spirit, and a history. But there was always a room to hide our embarrassing things, our ugly things.”
By 2010, Nayeri had been married for some years to Philip who she met in college. They had fought in the early years but now they are quieter and working on being kinder to each other.
“We each had one sad image of the other embedded in our psyche, and that made us contort to make the other happy: He imagined me sleeping under bridges, unable to survive without him. I imagined him huddled in a bathtub, alone and friendless.”
I got a sense that things were about to change when I read, “It was time to clean up this overlooked, brambly wing of my life, to read and write and talk to people who wanted the same things, and to fill the spaces where I had once been impoverished.”
22. Notes from the Midpoint of a Celibate Year by Melissa Febos. Febos writes that by embracing celibacy, her “life opened up” and provided her “more space in which to live.” She adds, “I luxuriated in the solitude. It was sometimes lonely, but that, too, was novel, like a weather system that moved through me and after a day, or sometimes just an hour in the late afternoon as the light changed toward evening, it moved on.”
“No matter how we grasp at other people, compare the words we find for what fills us, we are still alone with ourselves.”
“I forgot, for a spell, that my own company is more compelling than that of any stranger, and returning to this knowledge feels like a kind of love, like walking straight into the arms of a friend.”
1. Brief Important Moments Where I Was the Only Person on Earth by Megan Giddings. I was struck by the idea of being free is to be able to be out alone at night. For example, men may go to the movies alone – but do women?
Powerful quote: “My entire life, I’ve had to remind myself how precious I am to myself. That I deserve to be taken care of, that it is worthwhile for me to be alive, that I am not taking up space.”
2. Javelinas by Claire Dederer. “I stretched out on the living room floor with the high desert sunlight streaming all over me, and the decision to stop drinking happened to me. It was the saddest decision in the world – the decision to stop being alone in that particular way.”
3. Ward by Imani Perry. This story was especially poignant, and I nodded in agreement and understanding many times. I felt that Perry was voicing many of my own experiences when either staying in a hospital or visiting a loved one.
“A hospital room gives loneliness its peak expression.” While you are physically alone, “the comfort of alone is absent. The floor, naked, gleams clean. It reflects nothing. Smallness expands like a funhouse.” Then, there is the constant bustle of noise or conversations right outside that you are not included in but prevent you from fully resting.
A strange thing, which I believe is also true of many waiting rooms: “The television is nakedly honest in a hospital room. It does not suck you into its fantasies. It is a cacophonous box, boring and squawking.”
“We can be “healthy” in deed, and indeed, but even at our heartiest, we are most frail.” This is most apparent when we fall sick and need medical assistance and it is then that we realize just how precious and fragile life is.
“But there are in fact people in this world who maintain the gift of clarity when it comes to kindness. Children have it, usually, but we socialize them out of it.” I’m still pondering this.
“You have children to let them go eventually, hoping they will stay connected to you, but you are not entitled to that.” This sentence held a lot of meaning for me. It is a tremendous and wonderful feeling to be chosen to participate in my adult children’s lives. However, I also know the pain of exclusion, and the longing for connection.
4. Mother-Wit by Jeffery Renard Allen. About his relationship with his mother, Allen writes, “We were aligned. A nation of two.” Then, when his maternal grandmother dies, he learns how closely aligned his mother was with her own mother when she says, “’Now I have no one.’ I did not understand what she meant. Was I not someone? Were we not a nation of two?” His loneliness is palpable and his grief reaches depths of despair.
“Nothing I can do to save myself from the sunken place of grief. ‘Now I have nobody.’”
5. At the Horizon by Maggie Shipstead. This story is about taking the opportunity to go adventuring while you can and not waiting for someone to join you, as it is better to adventure alone than not to adventure at all. I love this passage:
“There are people I love who I wish had experienced these things too, but if I’d waited for them, I wouldn’t have done any of it. We’re told memories are best when they’re shared, but I’m saying sometimes it’s okay to gobble down the world like the most delicious midnight snack, all for you. I’m saying our memories are only ever really our own, anyway. I’m saying: take a trip.”
6. Exodus, 2020 by Emily Raboteau. This story is set during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was fascinating to read of how the neighborhood changes as people move out of the apartment buildings and what happens to those left behind who don’t have the resources to move. They miss the daily conversations, those points of connection when you meet neighbors on the elevator or in the laundry room etc.
One neighbor, while leaving, calls out, “’We’ll see you on the other side.’ He meant this as a kindness, presuming the pandemic’s end and our neighbors’ eventual return. But I was beginning to wonder, what if they never came back?”
7. Maine Man by Lev Grossman. “I was an artist. I was special. I was sparkly. I would walk another. And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: you didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.”
“I spent a lot of time at the library too. Though it turned out that none of the librarians were lonely.”
“You can still be lonely now, but back then it had a different texture to it. It was raw and uncut and feral.”
8. Alone Time by Lena Dunham. “But if I were being honest I’d answer them by saying that my heart could still ache for one home as I returned to myself in another.”
9. To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture by Yiyun Li. “Years ago, when I started writing in English, my husband asked if I understood the implication of the decision.”
“My husband, who writes computer programs, was asking about language. Did I understand what it meant to renounce my mother tongue?”
“One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in and claims understanding and empathy do people call it a tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.”
“It’s the absoluteness of my abandonment of Chinese, undertaken with such determination that it is a kind of suicide.”
“Rarely does a story start where we wish it had or end where we wish it would.”
“There’s so much to give up: hope, freedom, dignity. A private language, however, defies any confinement. Death alone can take it away.”
“Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections.”
10. Am I Still Here? by Anthony Doerr. The first two lines read, “I harbor a dark twin inside. He’s a sun-starved, ropy bastard and he lives somewhere north of my heart.” It’s a clever story about being present in the moment and actively participating in life in real time.
11. A Strange and Difficult Joy by Helena Fitzgerald. This story is about a woman daring to live alone. I loved this description of having the entire bed to yourself: “I sleep with my limbs giddily starfished across as much of the bed as possible, a self-aggrandizing compass reaching for the edges of the map.”
“Woman are the anchors of social labor, the glue pulling the family, and then the community, together with small talk and good manners and social niceties. Living alone as a woman is not just a luxury but a refusal to bend into the shape of patriarchal assumption and expectation.”
“Living alone is a reminder that we can make our bodies antisocial, hoarding our selfishness and our silence. Living alone offers the strange and rich pleasures of the world beyond the social, beyond the social, beyond the structures of home and family.”
12. 75 x 2 by Maile Meloy. The first sentence reads, “My grandparents were married for seventy-five years, which isn’t easy to do.”
“Toward the end, it started to feel like a sociology experiment with a tiny sample, or like two people stuck together in a small and leaking lifeboat.”
This line broke me: “He missed Lou – his companion and his great love, but also his prop and his memory aide, the person he tried hardest for, the one he didn’t want to let down.”
13. The Body Secret by Aja Gabel. This story is about the loneliness of miscarriage.
“He did everything he could, but this particular pain wasn’t communal.”
“How can so many people go through this [miscarriage] and so few communicate what it’s really like?”
“The thing no one told me about pregnancy is that when you are pregnant, you carry a secret, and so you are a secret to yourself. You are also a secret to your partner. You carry this alone. You cannot truly share the pain of growing life, just as you cannot truly share the pain of letting life go.”
“I knew that I had been right: our bodies are our most-kept secrets.”
14. The Perpetual Foreigner by Jean Kwok. Kwok refers to her memories of growing up in Hong Kong as “that small golden patch of sunlight in my life.”
She writes of moving to America and leaving everything behind. “I had left so much back in Hong Kong: my prowess in school, my sparkly gold slippers, my much-admired ability to curse as well as the fishmonger, my afternoons wandering the sunlit streets with my brothers and my fat ginger cat.”
Kwok’s loneliness is visceral: “How can you ease your loneliness when no one knows who you truly are?” And “I had carved myself into slices like a melon and there was no one who saw the entirety of who I was.” She fills this void “with another emotion: ambition.”
I loved that she was “always with [her] nose buried in a library book.”
“It wasn’t until we moved to the Netherlands and I became an immigrant for the second time that I realized how much of our identities are reflected back upon us by other people. These echoes reaffirm who we think we are, for good or for bad.”
“Never having felt truly American, I realize how American I have become.” This is true for me also.
15. The Woman Who Walked Alone by Amy Shearn. This story includes the adventure of Lillian Alling, an Eastern European immigrant who sets out from New York City on foot. It takes her three years to reach her destination of Siberia. Alling was thirty years old when she set out and no-one knows for sure what motivated her to uproot herself and set out on her journey.
Alling would never have been able to afford the fair for a steamer ship on her meagre salary. “Instead she took a bag full of bread and tea, and some maps she’d hand-copied from the New York Public Library and crossed from New York State into Canada. It was Christmas Eve 1926, a brisk time for taking an extended stroll.”
“She always walked alone.”
Amy Shearn wonders, “Maybe I feel lonely because I am never alone.” Further, she writes, “Lillian’s story feeds my wanderlust at a time when my life does not.” Then, explains that she is in “a lonely marriage.” Shearn and her husband do not connect and spend most of their time apart.
She takes action by moving out of the family home into a place on her own. Finding she has time on her hands, Shearn pursues activities that bring her joy; she “read[s] old favorite books that curl up in [her] brain like cats.” Like Lillian, she understands “that the only story that matters is the one you’re living,” and also like Lillian, she feels no compulsion to explain herself or correct other people’s assumptions about her.
16. Part and Apart by Peter Ho Davies. This story begins, “Coventry, England, is a nondescript place, not famous for much – Lady Godiva rode naked through its streets to protest taxes according to medieval legend, and the Luftwaffe bombed it flat in one night in 1940.”
Then, in 1981, something magical happened, and “a Star Trek convention came to town.” Davies attended the convention alone, too ashamed to admit his interest in something considered “aberrant” in the 1980s. Davies writes, “It’s the worst loneliness, I think, the loneliness we feel among those we feel we should be most like, most want to be like. Our tribe turns out to be not quite our tribe.”
“One thing we know about the frontier is that it’s a lonely place.” Think of the vastness of space, it would be easy to feel alone. However, aboard the Starship Enterprise there is a multiracial community we can invest our interest in. We watch television and read books alone, however we are connected to “all those invisible strangers out there who are also watching and reading by themselves.”
Davies concludes that despite his feeling of alienation at the convention, he has learned “that we find companionship not with our own, those like us, but with those others, unlike us, even aliens, with whom all we share is a voyage of loneliness. Which sometimes turns out to be enough.”
17. Letting Go by Maya Shanbhag Lang. The author tells the story of living alongside her mother who has the disease of Alzheimer’s. Lang writes, “If I try to reason with my mother, my time will be squandered.”
Lang describes her mother as “a formidable scientist, a no-nonsense physician, a force of nature.” And asks, “how do we negotiate ambiguous loss? My mother is present but absent. I don’t know who I’m talking to, if I should fight for her, try to pull her back to me.”
She enjoys watching her daughter and her mother interacting at mealtime. “They’re like siblings, whispering to each other, giggling conspiratorially.” However, she experiences loneliness, friends and family have accepted their situation and no longer ask how she is. Her world has shrunk and she writes, “my mother and I are trading places.”
Her daughter has the freedom to accept her grandmother as she is. However, Lang cannot let go of her memory of who her mother was. Lang struggles, initially resisting putting her mother in an assisted living facility, however, when she finally submits, she discovers that at the facility her “mother finds what [she] could not give her: peers, social support, community.”
Meanwhile, Lang writes, “the most oppressive feature of loneliness, [is] the way it limits the imagination, whispering to us that life will never be better, that we are not allowed to envision possibilities. Loneliness chips away at the space we occupy.”
Weeks go by, the wisteria is in bloom, she lifts her face to the lovely blue sky to gaze at its beauty and feel the sun’s warmth. “This is what [her] mother would have wanted for [her], to stand in the light.”
She concludes, “I know now that when we let go, we do not lose – for in the act of letting go, we find ourselves, come back to ourselves, and the reunion is joyous, exceeding what we once dared imagine.”
18. Trading Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. She writes of her father “leaving his country and his family, stripping himself of the reassurance of belonging.” For a long time, Lahiri desired “to belong to a place, either the one her parents came from or America, spread out before us.”
However, “when she became a writer [her] desk became home; there was no need for another. Every story is a foreign territory, which, in the process of writing, is occupied and then abandoned.”
19. On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward. This story begins with the death of her Beloved. After describing his physical attributes she writes, “He fixed me breakfast and pots of loose-leaf tea every morning.” How my heart ached when I read about this simple, yet beautiful, daily act of love, now absent.
Indeed, “the absence of my Beloved echoed in every room of our house.” And “My loss was a tender second skin.”
“As the pandemic settled in and stretched,” Ward works on her new book. She writes at least one sentence per day, sometimes more.
Ward writes of the pervasive inequality in the USA:
“Witness Black people, Indigenous people, so many poor brown people, lying on beds in frigid hospitals, gasping our last breaths with COVID-riddled lungs, rendered flat by undiagnosed underlying conditions, triggered by years of food deserts, stress, and poverty, lives spent snatching sweets so we could eat one delicious morsel, savor some sugar on the tongue, oh Lord, because the flavor of our lives is so often bitter.”
Finally, Ward writes of how a doctor told her that hearing is the last sense to go when someone is dying. I have been told this also.
“When someone is dying, they lose sight and smell and taste and touch. They even forget who they are. But in the end, they hear you.”
20. Reliquary: A Quartet by Lidia Yuknavitch. The gift of an empty hummingbird’s nest is on her desk. Yuknavitch ponders what happened to the owners of the nest. Were they beset by disaster, “or is the absence marked by flight and becoming? Death or life?”
“The empty nest is either a delicate and beautiful artifact from the natural world or a stain, a violence.”
Meanwhile, Yuknavitch is facing an empty nest of her own. She dreads her son going off to college. She writes, “I was mourning my son’s leaving before it ever happened because I carry loss inside my chest where a heart should be. My body is a lifedeath space.” Her daughter died on the same day she was born. She cannot stand to let her son go. Instead, she moves to an alternate location to write and avoids the point of separation.
“There is an alone inside grief, and it is yours, and the alone is both unbearable and simultaneously beautiful. Never let anyone tell you how long your grief should last or what to do with it.”
Finally, Yuknavitch concludes that “the emptiness of the nest is like my mother-gut, that space that held grief and death and life and joy, now filled with fat and thriving stories.”
21. The Ugly Corner by Dina Nayeri. Nayeri describes her family home as having “a spirit, and a history. But there was always a room to hide our embarrassing things, our ugly things.”
By 2010, Nayeri had been married for some years to Philip who she met in college. They had fought in the early years but now they are quieter and working on being kinder to each other.
“We each had one sad image of the other embedded in our psyche, and that made us contort to make the other happy: He imagined me sleeping under bridges, unable to survive without him. I imagined him huddled in a bathtub, alone and friendless.”
I got a sense that things were about to change when I read, “It was time to clean up this overlooked, brambly wing of my life, to read and write and talk to people who wanted the same things, and to fill the spaces where I had once been impoverished.”
22. Notes from the Midpoint of a Celibate Year by Melissa Febos. Febos writes that by embracing celibacy, her “life opened up” and provided her “more space in which to live.” She adds, “I luxuriated in the solitude. It was sometimes lonely, but that, too, was novel, like a weather system that moved through me and after a day, or sometimes just an hour in the late afternoon as the light changed toward evening, it moved on.”
“No matter how we grasp at other people, compare the words we find for what fills us, we are still alone with ourselves.”
“I forgot, for a spell, that my own company is more compelling than that of any stranger, and returning to this knowledge feels like a kind of love, like walking straight into the arms of a friend.”
August 2, 2022
Ok so… To Speak is to Blunder but I Venture is a true masterpiece. And I also loved At the Horizon, Exodus 2020, Am I Still Here, The Body Secret, and Letting Go. Oh and also the Lena Dunham one which I’m pretty sure is about her break up w Jack Antonoff and which I did not want to like
December 12, 2021
What a brilliant concept to collect stories about all the varied configurations of loneliness and aloneness, written by literary geniuses, and market it during a global pandemic! Each of these stories is fabulous on its own, none of them are similar, and reading all of them together has given me a cohesive feeling of calm. Which is not what I was expecting at all. Cultural isolation I expected, and lonely hearts, but I'd never thought about gender differences in terms of being alone. I really appreciate the collective wisdom here that shows aspects of isolation not entirely negative, gives hope that the negative bits won't last forever, and virtually hugs you in a way that says hey, we're really not alone.
March 20, 2022
Thank you to Catapult, Counterpoint, Softskull and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!
Available April 19th.
Isolation is a term most of us are very familiar with these days. We are told to isolate from our jobs, our elderly, our children, our vulnerable, our schools and institutions. We are told to go into lockdown and quarentines. Yet what do these words really mean?
The Lonely Stories captures the quintessential emotion of our current era, the longing ache, the ugliness, and, in some cases, the relief. Through short stories by masterful Storytellers, the collection shows us that maybe there is beauty and art in being alone, just as there is beauty in finding a community of loners. I throughly enjoyed reading this collection and will remember the stories for a while.
Available April 19th.
Isolation is a term most of us are very familiar with these days. We are told to isolate from our jobs, our elderly, our children, our vulnerable, our schools and institutions. We are told to go into lockdown and quarentines. Yet what do these words really mean?
The Lonely Stories captures the quintessential emotion of our current era, the longing ache, the ugliness, and, in some cases, the relief. Through short stories by masterful Storytellers, the collection shows us that maybe there is beauty and art in being alone, just as there is beauty in finding a community of loners. I throughly enjoyed reading this collection and will remember the stories for a while.
June 9, 2022
reading this in the peak of my solitude is both unnerving and liberating. some favs:
-introduction
-brief important moments where i was the only person on earth
-ward
-at the horizon (!!!!!)
-a strange and difficult joy (!!!)
-75 x 2
-the body secret (!!!)
-letting go (!!!)
-reliquary: a quartet
-notes from the midpoint of a celibate year
-introduction
-brief important moments where i was the only person on earth
-ward
-at the horizon (!!!!!)
-a strange and difficult joy (!!!)
-75 x 2
-the body secret (!!!)
-letting go (!!!)
-reliquary: a quartet
-notes from the midpoint of a celibate year
January 22, 2022
*Thank you, NetGalley, for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest review*
In a lovely collection of essays tackling loneliness, we see varying voices exploring grief, heartache, loss, racism, xenophobia, poverty, parenthood, chronic illness, etc.
While we still go about our day-to-day lives in a seemingly never ending pandemic, reading about the hope that comes out in the different understandings of loneliness featured in this collection helped put into words some things I'd been grappling with. Solitude and separation through multiple lenses and different writing styles helps make the term feel like it's expanding.
There were definitely a few essays that felt more fleshed out and put-together than others but overall, this was incredibly insightful.
CW: death, grief, miscarriage, terminally ill loved ones, references to slavery, mentions of police brutality, racism, xenophobia
In a lovely collection of essays tackling loneliness, we see varying voices exploring grief, heartache, loss, racism, xenophobia, poverty, parenthood, chronic illness, etc.
While we still go about our day-to-day lives in a seemingly never ending pandemic, reading about the hope that comes out in the different understandings of loneliness featured in this collection helped put into words some things I'd been grappling with. Solitude and separation through multiple lenses and different writing styles helps make the term feel like it's expanding.
There were definitely a few essays that felt more fleshed out and put-together than others but overall, this was incredibly insightful.
CW: death, grief, miscarriage, terminally ill loved ones, references to slavery, mentions of police brutality, racism, xenophobia
August 4, 2022
As the title suggests, these stories reflect on what it means or feels like to be alone. Jessmyn Ward’s on Witness and Respair powerfully speaks to the grief she feels after the loss of her “beloved” to Covid in the early days of the pandemic. Yiyun Li’s To Speak Is to Blunder, but I Venture centers on her thoughts of giving up her native language of Chinese for English and what that means for her memories of her birth place. Dina Nayeri’s The Ugly Corner explores her search for happiness and her true purpose in life. These stories were my favorite ones from this collection. They provide comfort and solace for those times one feels alone.
April 24, 2026
As always with a book of essays written by different people, some are great, some are boring, and the rest fall somewhere in the middle. These range from authors lamenting loneliness and enforced separation from others, to (my favorites) those celebrating solitary pursuits as sanity savers.
March 5, 2022
A beautiful collection of ruminations on what it means to feel lonely. It was a delight to read the different interpretations and perspectives on loneliness and how loneliness intersects with sadness, joy, grief, anxiety, self-discovery, relationships, etc. Reading this left me feeling content and contemplative.
The Lonely Stories features 22 stories, mostly original and a few previously published. My favorite original stories were “Javelinas” by Claire Dederer which chronicles the author’s relationship with herself and with alcohol; “At the Horizon” by Maggie Shipstead which is a lovely meditation on being alone; and “The Perpetual Foreigner” by Jean Kwok which details her experiences growing up and being an immigrant twice. Jesmyn Ward’s previously published “On Witness and Respair” is a moving story about the death of her husband. Anthony Doerr’s previously published “Am I Still Here?” is an amusing anecdote about loneliness and the pull of modern technology.
I recommend this collection to anyone in the mood for a meditative read and those who enjoy thinking about the complexities of loneliness, whether you are alone or not.
Thank you to NetGalley and Catapult for the opportunity to read this ARC.
The Lonely Stories features 22 stories, mostly original and a few previously published. My favorite original stories were “Javelinas” by Claire Dederer which chronicles the author’s relationship with herself and with alcohol; “At the Horizon” by Maggie Shipstead which is a lovely meditation on being alone; and “The Perpetual Foreigner” by Jean Kwok which details her experiences growing up and being an immigrant twice. Jesmyn Ward’s previously published “On Witness and Respair” is a moving story about the death of her husband. Anthony Doerr’s previously published “Am I Still Here?” is an amusing anecdote about loneliness and the pull of modern technology.
I recommend this collection to anyone in the mood for a meditative read and those who enjoy thinking about the complexities of loneliness, whether you are alone or not.
Thank you to NetGalley and Catapult for the opportunity to read this ARC.
February 13, 2022
Even though the title is a good description about the stories, it doesn't describe how many way people look at being alone. It's not always a sad way but it is always a way to grow and to change ones life. Every one of the stories is a heartfelt place where the author was willing to go while writing their story. I like every one of the story because in each story the author takes you on a journey that makes you look at your own aloneness and how you feel about being alone. The stories will take you from a diving experience, a writer's dilemma, to how one decides when to change ones life and it will make you go, Huh at the end.
So, don't let the title stop you from enjoy this book, because you'll find that being alone is ok.
I want to thank Catapult, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press, Catapult and Netgalley for this intriguing book.
So, don't let the title stop you from enjoy this book, because you'll find that being alone is ok.
I want to thank Catapult, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press, Catapult and Netgalley for this intriguing book.
October 20, 2022
A very honest account of loneliness in the modern age which made me feel very comforted given the tabooness that arises around the topic of loneliness. I particularly enjoyed Lena Dunham's essay about break ups and felt it really hit home and gave me some clarity on my own my break up.
Would definitely recommend for anyone as we all experience loneliness and this book explores it on many levels.
Would definitely recommend for anyone as we all experience loneliness and this book explores it on many levels.
April 23, 2022
Most of these essays are really good and a few are sublime. It’s a great mix of different takes on the topic too.
August 25, 2023
The Lonely Stories is a compilation of 22 diverse views and stories regarding loneliness by well-known writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Maggie Shipstead, Lena Dunham, Yiyun Li, Anthony Doerr, and more. This collection of life reflections or essays highlights solitude, longing, and loneliness through the lens of different people who went through varied experiences in life, as well as the circumstances that led them to gain moments of clarity about said themes. Loneliness, as well as love, is a word that is quite difficult to define, for we experience it in numerous ways that may not be identical to other people's or even comprehended, hence the manifold of perspectives. Some days, loneliness is so easy to associate with solitude, but aloneness is not always a frightful thing; it can bring power, healing, and most importantly, clarity.
This collection uplifted my mental spirit so deeply, for it gave me assurance that some feelings are meant to be embraced and let flow until they become part of you.
I am filled with so many thoughts and personal reflections of my own about these things, which I decided would be just another writing series that could also include some excerpts from this book as I dissect and reflect through them.
____________________
𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜: 4 stars ★
____________________
𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙨/𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨: (just some)
“Our society tends to expect women to hold everything and everyone together, socially and emotionally; women who relish being alone are the witches, the misfits. So it felt right to make more room for women to examine and honor the shape of their aloneness.”
“As an introspective, creative, and also frequently sick kid, I found this vision both slightly unsettling and profoundly reassuring: no matter what happened, I’d always be there for myself.”
“Nevertheless, there was no magic cure. Sometimes the only way out is through.”
“And while loneliness can be devastating, I find it deeply moving that it can also function as a portal to beauty and discovery.”
This collection uplifted my mental spirit so deeply, for it gave me assurance that some feelings are meant to be embraced and let flow until they become part of you.
I am filled with so many thoughts and personal reflections of my own about these things, which I decided would be just another writing series that could also include some excerpts from this book as I dissect and reflect through them.
____________________
𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜: 4 stars ★
____________________
𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙨/𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨: (just some)
“Our society tends to expect women to hold everything and everyone together, socially and emotionally; women who relish being alone are the witches, the misfits. So it felt right to make more room for women to examine and honor the shape of their aloneness.”
“As an introspective, creative, and also frequently sick kid, I found this vision both slightly unsettling and profoundly reassuring: no matter what happened, I’d always be there for myself.”
“Nevertheless, there was no magic cure. Sometimes the only way out is through.”
“And while loneliness can be devastating, I find it deeply moving that it can also function as a portal to beauty and discovery.”
February 25, 2022
Natalie Eve Garrett's collection The Lonely Stories brings together stories from diverse authors reflecting on the theme of loneliness. What I appreciated was the variety of feelings associated with loneliness and teasing apart the difference between loneliness and being alone and solitude, which does not have as much of a negative connotation to it. Stories highlight both the struggles of being lonely as well as the craving for solitude. Examples included living with chronic illness, what is was like to live in New York City when the coronavirus first hit the city, and being an immigrant in a foreign country (twice over). Some authors (Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, Jesmyn Ward, and Lidia Yuknavitch) I truly enjoy contributed to this collection. Li highlights the differences between grief and tragedy. Doerr writes about the push and pull of technology. Literature's portrayal of men versus women and the concept of aloneness was described, where men go on solitary quests, while there is no female equivalent. Recognizing that one is happy in a relationship but also missing being alone was resonant. These stories give the reader a lot to reflect on. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection.
Thanks to Catapult via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.
Thanks to Catapult via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.
March 29, 2023
Welp. I thought I would get some interesting meditations on solitude and loneliness here, and mostly what I actually got was a sort of secret spilling, confessional booth for writers, which was not what I expected and as I learned while reading it, also not what I wanted.
Credit to the writers featured in this collection for their honesty and candidness. But I think most of what they are “confessing” here, while deeply meaningful to them, doesn’t necessarily play well for a general audience.
A lot of pandemic stuff here too, which is unsurprising, but not something of interest to me as a reader because, quite frankly, I just recently lived it and it sucked. Addiction stories too are of no interest to me, and there is a good bit of that sort of content here as well.
There are a few stories here that I did like and are worth your time, all of which felt more in line with what I thought this collection would be rather than what most of it turned out to be.
-At the Horizon, Maggie Shipstead
-Maine Man, Lev Grossman
-Alone Time, Lena Dunham
-Trading Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri
These four are absolutely worth a read, the rest you can pass on.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
Credit to the writers featured in this collection for their honesty and candidness. But I think most of what they are “confessing” here, while deeply meaningful to them, doesn’t necessarily play well for a general audience.
A lot of pandemic stuff here too, which is unsurprising, but not something of interest to me as a reader because, quite frankly, I just recently lived it and it sucked. Addiction stories too are of no interest to me, and there is a good bit of that sort of content here as well.
There are a few stories here that I did like and are worth your time, all of which felt more in line with what I thought this collection would be rather than what most of it turned out to be.
-At the Horizon, Maggie Shipstead
-Maine Man, Lev Grossman
-Alone Time, Lena Dunham
-Trading Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri
These four are absolutely worth a read, the rest you can pass on.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
October 5, 2023
⭐️ 3.5
"I know now that when we let go, we do not lose — for in the act of letting go, we find ourselves, and this reunion is joyous, exceeding what we once dared imagine"
Being alone and feeling lonely are things I've struggled a lot all my life, and I still do. It's something that often comes up on my therapy sessions and goes through my mind during random times of the day. Reading this book made me realize that there are more people who feel different types of loneliness as I do and it was comforting to read about it. I loved being able to read about each of the writer's experience. I'm just giving it 3.5 stars because sometimes the way the chapters were followed ended up being a bit repetitive, I think some more unique and different experiences could be included. Also, there were some I wished to read more of.
"I know now that when we let go, we do not lose — for in the act of letting go, we find ourselves, and this reunion is joyous, exceeding what we once dared imagine"
Being alone and feeling lonely are things I've struggled a lot all my life, and I still do. It's something that often comes up on my therapy sessions and goes through my mind during random times of the day. Reading this book made me realize that there are more people who feel different types of loneliness as I do and it was comforting to read about it. I loved being able to read about each of the writer's experience. I'm just giving it 3.5 stars because sometimes the way the chapters were followed ended up being a bit repetitive, I think some more unique and different experiences could be included. Also, there were some I wished to read more of.
January 21, 2022
Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy!
These stories were so raw and honest explaining how each writer has experienced their own form of "loneliness". It really made me think about how I process being lonely and what that looks like to me and how do I feel during this time. With many of the stories, I could relate to their feelings. I very much appreciated a few of the stories that referenced they preferred being alone then going out. I have felt that and this helped to show that it is ok. Each person interprets feelings in different ways and loneliness may hit at different times and different ways. Whether it is a death of a loved one, traveling alone, a break up, etc. I wanted more of each story and would love to read more from these well written authors.
These stories were so raw and honest explaining how each writer has experienced their own form of "loneliness". It really made me think about how I process being lonely and what that looks like to me and how do I feel during this time. With many of the stories, I could relate to their feelings. I very much appreciated a few of the stories that referenced they preferred being alone then going out. I have felt that and this helped to show that it is ok. Each person interprets feelings in different ways and loneliness may hit at different times and different ways. Whether it is a death of a loved one, traveling alone, a break up, etc. I wanted more of each story and would love to read more from these well written authors.
July 4, 2022
Going into a collection of short stories, I was expecting I'd dislike some. The topics, mood, and style vary throughout the book, but the quality is there in every story.
A great read for contemplating on aloneness, loneliness and connection to oneself and others. Or it can be just an interesting series of life stories.
A great read for contemplating on aloneness, loneliness and connection to oneself and others. Or it can be just an interesting series of life stories.
August 18, 2023
Thoroughly enjoyed! Not all essays spoke to me in the same way, but some really SHOUTED at me.
I really loved The Perpetual Immigrant by Jean Kwok, The Body Secret by Aja Gabel, To Speak Is To Blunder But I Venture by Yiyun Li, and Letting Go by Maya Shanbhag Lang ⭐️💫
I really loved The Perpetual Immigrant by Jean Kwok, The Body Secret by Aja Gabel, To Speak Is To Blunder But I Venture by Yiyun Li, and Letting Go by Maya Shanbhag Lang ⭐️💫
March 13, 2024
Picked this one up on a whim and so glad I did! Some of the essays felt more fleshed out than others but the ones that resonated with me really resonated with me. I appreciate all the different perspectives and experiences reflected in this collection.
July 27, 2022
some stories were beautiful and heartbreaking but some were… bland and emotionless i was a bit disappointed
Read
June 10, 20227/10
May 29, 2022
Have you ever felt guilty for being lonely, when you seem to have it all? Or as The Lonely Stories described:
I felt lonely sometimes and it is not something that I am proud to admit. It's buried deep inside me, yet I never really know why it's tough to scream it out loud. I am thankful that The Lonely Stories helps me to scream it together (internally) with these 22 writers.
As I read through the pages, I understand that loneliness can happen to anyone, even the happy ones. It is not something we should be ashamed of because loneliness is just a part of life. It's one of the reasons we appreciate our surroundings more, and it comes and goes.
These stories helped me to realize that we humans are not really strangers. We might experience different job, different lives, different country. But what we feel inside, we feel it alone together. Here are some my favorite stories from the book:
1. To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture by Yiyun Li
A story about feeling lonely in speaking a foreign language, how Li felt it hard to feel in an adopted language.
2. A Strange and Difficult Joy by Helena Fitzgerald
When women never seemed to be alone in the same way, and women who break free seems to be the object of pity, a problem to be fixed.
3. Am I Still Here? by Anthony Doerr
How we feel lonely amidst the flood of email notifications, all wanting to talk to us, but we try to be quiet.
To sum up, I thank the editor and 22 writers who shared their side of the story. You help me to reveal and befriend loneliness, appreciate people around me more, and that feelings are nothing to be ashamed of.
"I feel lonely, sometimes desperately so, and yet I am never alone. It doesn't make sense, which bothers me. Because what am I lonely for? Whom am I missing? How can I feel lonely when I am never alone?"
I felt lonely sometimes and it is not something that I am proud to admit. It's buried deep inside me, yet I never really know why it's tough to scream it out loud. I am thankful that The Lonely Stories helps me to scream it together (internally) with these 22 writers.
As I read through the pages, I understand that loneliness can happen to anyone, even the happy ones. It is not something we should be ashamed of because loneliness is just a part of life. It's one of the reasons we appreciate our surroundings more, and it comes and goes.
These stories helped me to realize that we humans are not really strangers. We might experience different job, different lives, different country. But what we feel inside, we feel it alone together. Here are some my favorite stories from the book:
1. To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture by Yiyun Li
A story about feeling lonely in speaking a foreign language, how Li felt it hard to feel in an adopted language.
2. A Strange and Difficult Joy by Helena Fitzgerald
When women never seemed to be alone in the same way, and women who break free seems to be the object of pity, a problem to be fixed.
3. Am I Still Here? by Anthony Doerr
How we feel lonely amidst the flood of email notifications, all wanting to talk to us, but we try to be quiet.
To sum up, I thank the editor and 22 writers who shared their side of the story. You help me to reveal and befriend loneliness, appreciate people around me more, and that feelings are nothing to be ashamed of.
December 22, 2024
“Sometimes I can simply look into myself to know the world around me.”
“We're told memories are best when they're shared, but I'm saying sometimes it's okay to gobble down the world like the most delicious midnight snack, all for you. I'm saying our memories are only ever really our own, anyway.”
“But if you're actually happy alone, if you've accomplished that mythical prerequisite for love, you will probably also have rendered love less necessary, made yourself less amenable to accommodating someone's needs and schedule and foibles. You run the risk of becoming set in your ways, of being unable not to feel smothered.”
“But if I were being honest I'd answer them by saying that my heart could still ache for one home as I returned to myself in another.”
“There was nowhere else to go but myself.”
“Being alone is not the terror we escape; it is the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice. A paired life is not an aspirational state; for me, it is a compromise.”
“My imaginativeness was in part a product of all of this alone time, but it was also a balm for it: it was hard to be deeply lonely when surrounded by the hazy echoes of my former selves.“
“My entire life, I've had to remind myself how precious I am to myself.”
“There are people I love who I wish had experienced these things, too, but if l'a waited for them, I wouldn't have done any of it.”
“My independence was still novel, and every day felt like an opportunity to indulge in my own company, to soak in it like a bubble bath.”
“What one goes toward is less definitive than that from which one turns away.”
“l was still defining myself by what I had lost.”
“We're told memories are best when they're shared, but I'm saying sometimes it's okay to gobble down the world like the most delicious midnight snack, all for you. I'm saying our memories are only ever really our own, anyway.”
“But if you're actually happy alone, if you've accomplished that mythical prerequisite for love, you will probably also have rendered love less necessary, made yourself less amenable to accommodating someone's needs and schedule and foibles. You run the risk of becoming set in your ways, of being unable not to feel smothered.”
“But if I were being honest I'd answer them by saying that my heart could still ache for one home as I returned to myself in another.”
“There was nowhere else to go but myself.”
“Being alone is not the terror we escape; it is the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice. A paired life is not an aspirational state; for me, it is a compromise.”
“My imaginativeness was in part a product of all of this alone time, but it was also a balm for it: it was hard to be deeply lonely when surrounded by the hazy echoes of my former selves.“
“My entire life, I've had to remind myself how precious I am to myself.”
“There are people I love who I wish had experienced these things, too, but if l'a waited for them, I wouldn't have done any of it.”
“My independence was still novel, and every day felt like an opportunity to indulge in my own company, to soak in it like a bubble bath.”
“What one goes toward is less definitive than that from which one turns away.”
“l was still defining myself by what I had lost.”
Displaying 1 - 30 of 249 reviews