Lonely: A Memoir Book

This boldly honest and elegantly written memoir reveals the painful and sometimes debilitating experience of living with chronic loneliness the first book of its kind devoted exclusively to the subject.

Despite having a demanding job, good friends, and a supportive family, Emily White spent many of her evenings and weekends alone at home, trying to understand why she felt so disconnected from everyone. To keep up the façade of an active social life and to hide the painful truth, the successful young lawyer often lied to those around her and to herself. She was suffering from severe loneliness.

In this insightful, soul-baring, and illuminating memoir, White reveals her battle to understand and overcome this crippling condition, and contends that chronic loneliness deserves the same attention as other mental difficulties such as depression. "Right now, loneliness is something few people are willing to admit to," she writes. "There's no need for this silence, no need for the shame and self-blame it creates. There's nothing wrong with loneliness, and we need to start acknowledging this through a wider and more open discussion of the state."

Interweaving her personal story with the latest in cutting-edge scientific research as well as the incredibly moving accounts offered by numerous lonely men and women White provides a deep and thorough portrait of this increasingly common but too often ignored affliction. By investigating the science of loneliness, challenging its stigma, encouraging other lonely people to talk about their experiences, and setting out one person's struggle, Lonely redefines how we look at loneliness and helps those who are afflicted understand their mood in an entirely new light, ultimately providing solace and hope.

Publishers Weekly

An astonishingly forthright work by a Canadian lawyer traces her painful personal journey through chronic loneliness in light of social taboos and changing cultural and medical notions. White can pinpoint the origin of her sense of loneliness to the early divorce of her parents, leaving her with long stretches of being home by herself as her two much older sisters and working mother were absent. She recognized later that her mother, too, had battled a self-imposed isolation, underscoring a genetic component to the state. Moreover, the author’s choice of practicing specialized law in a small Toronto firm provided her long hours in the office and little outside contact. Her loneliness, she found, became increasingly self-perpetuating: rejecting invitations, eschewing connections, and generally refusing to participate “in life in the way that it was meant to be lived.” The stigma of being lonely kept her from admitting her state for years (compounded by her inability to come out about being gay until she was 35); finally, she spoke with a sympathetic therapist and opened a blog to hear views from others. White plunged into research on the subject, revealing studies about the alienating nature of modern society and the health risks of chronic loneliness. White’s work is brutally honest as she emphasizes that loneliness is not the same as depression. (Mar.)