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“I was really interested in the idea of the body as a place of imprisonment but also, the body as a place of liberation.” Olivia Laing speaks about her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Norton, 2021), and how she addresses the themes of illness, sexual violence, and incarceration with imagery and by including historical figures of the past century in this conversation with author Maggie Nelson for the Center for Fiction.
“The combination of gardening and writing works amazingly well for me. It’s such a nice antidote to writing books,” says author and critic Olivia Laing. In this NOWNESS video, Laing, whose most recent book is her first novel, Crudo (Norton, 2018), talks about the Cambridge home and garden she shares with her husband, poet Ian Patterson, and how her surroundings affect her creative life.
At the New Craftsmen in London, Olivia Laing reads from Ernest Hemingway's short story "Now I Lay Me," and then from her second book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (Picador, 2013), which chronicles the alcoholism of six writers. Laing's new book, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016), examines loneliness and contemporary interpersonal relations.
