The Lonely Stories ed. by Natalie Eve Garrett
Loneliness is described as a growing epidemic that the modern world faces, one that has harmful effects on both our mental and physical health. But is being lonely and being alone interchangeable? And what does it mean to live as either? The Lonely Stories (2022), edited by American author Natalie Eve Garrett, is a cathartic collection of essays from 22 celebrated writers, aiming to explore the joys and struggles of loneliness in the 21st century.
These essays approach the topic of aloneness and loneliness – and the vast but somehow overlapping space between the two – in entirely different ways. These authors capture the loneliness that comes in the form of losing a partner, immigrating to a foreign country, living through a pandemic in social isolation, switching out your native tongue, or finding the time to find yourself again. They illuminate the ways in which being alone (by choice or by force) affects even those who seek it. Most importantly, these stories highlight that loneliness doesn’t necessarily come from the absence of people around us – and that “there are many ways to be lonely. Even in a crowd.”
Like in any collection, some stories stand out above others – while a number of them seem to cut through personal insecurities and pinpoint the exact universal feelings evoked by the state of loneliness, others are rather lacklustre. It’s not surprising then, that the two threads connecting my favourite stories seem to be the threads I myself have personal experience in: that of being lonely and a woman, and of being lonely due to immigration.
The latter is easy enough to contend with from a realistic point of view – moving to a different country, having to adapt to different customs and cultures marks you as an alien, an outsider. It’s easy to feel alone when, culturally speaking, you are. However, two writers in particular expand on this idea even further, taking a seemingly straightforward issue and painting it in even deeper, more nuanced colours.
In the most expertly written essay of the lot, ‘To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture,’ Yiyun Li writes not only of the challenges of being a writer in a tongue that isn’t your native one, but of existing in a world entirely separate from the cultural identity of your childhood. In this essay, she speaks candidly of her choice to leave her language, life and past in China behind, even at the expense of her fractured identity.
“One's relationship with the native language is similar to that with the past. Rarely does a story start where we wish it had or end where we wish it would.”
Jhumpa Lahiri, on the other hand, writes of the difficulties of reconciling the cultural identity of your parents and your heritage with a different identity given to you from birth in her essay, ‘Trading Stories.’ She recounts her struggles to carve out a home either in the country of her parents’ births or the country of her own, a task made all the more difficult by her perceived inability to belong. The loneliness that is born of an identity crisis like this is both highly relatable for those who are immigrants themselves, and also a source of immense relief. Speaking of one of the first stories she wrote, Lahiri says:
“It was set in the building where my mother had grown up, and where I spent much of my time when I was in India. I see now that my impulse to write this story, and several like-minded stories that followed, was to prove something to my parents: that I understood, on my own terms, in my own words, in a limited but precise way, the world they came from. For though they had created me, and reared me, and lived with me day after day, I knew that I was a stranger to them, an American child. In spite of our closeness, I feared that I was alien. This was the predominant anxiety I had felt while growing up.”
The other notable thread is the difference between the way men and women approach the theme of loneliness. While for men aloneness is a noble quest, one that they may or may not enjoy, one that may or may not lead to loneliness but one they have chosen regardless, for women it is a source of shame, a failing in one sense or another. Lena Dunham encapsulates this the best in her essay ‘Alone Time,’ pointing out the extra baggage a woman who is alone must carry.
"I'm going to die alone." It's a refrain often uttered by women, with a kind of tragicomic self-awareness, after a bad date or the breakup of a brief romance or the adoption of a calico cat. [...] But even said jokingly, the words are possessed of a horrible tyranny, as though aloneness is an island on which, as punishment for failing to successfully adapt yourself to romantic love, you are marooned. Alone is a place where nobody would want to go on vacation, much less live permanently.”
In a different essay, ‘A Strange and Difficult Joy,’ Helen Fitzgerald also addresses loneliness as a by-product of failure from a woman’s perspective.
“I wasn't alone because I had aimed at being with someone and missed the way women are often portrayed – but because I had aimed squarely at being alone and hit the target.”
In this way and in these accounts, loneliness becomes something else entirely – both a gendered experience, and a signifier of deeper socio-political preconceptions. Through these essays, the writers explore the complexities of an emotion many of us have felt, but few understood in relation to our wider social landscape.
The result is a collection that fosters connection: both a brave exploration of and a hopeful antidote to the domain of loneliness. The Lonely Stories is a compelling piece of work, one that should be read by everyone who believes that they’re alone, if only to remind them that they’re not.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.