Q: What books do you recommend for coming to terms with lifelong loneliness?
Graphic designer, 36, south-west England
A: Amanda Craig, author and critic, writes:
Loneliness is so much a part of being both a writer and reader that it’s no wonder most of us are what Patrick Hamilton’s novel calls The Slaves of Solitude.
Shakespeare invented the word, Philip Larkin celebrated it, but Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first to live with loneliness. Shipwrecked on his desert island for 28 years, he builds shelter, finds God and discovers companionship through compassion. Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter draws on this robust example through Polly Flint, who transcends her isolation through reading and liberalism.
Coming to terms with loneliness is harder. Anita Brookner’s entire oeuvre is poignantly preoccupied by the stoicism required for an intelligent spinster. Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn is funnier, and Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne sadder.
People can be lonely within relationships, too, as John Williams’s masterpiece Stoner shows. An unremarkable American academic “cut out for failure”, his cold, doomed marriage is the opposite to that of Anne Tyler’s widower in The Accidental Tourist. Chances change lives, as do choices.
Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City builds on Colin Wilson’s concept of artists as outsiders and is fascinating, bracing and informative. However, the children’s classic Goodnight Mister Tom provides the most comfort in its affecting portrait of how a bitter old countryman is transformed by taking in an abused London boy during the blitz.
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