A Year in Reading: Laura Warrell

Before Covid, I was already a bit lonely: unpartnered, living on my own, plugging away at a notoriously solitary line of work as an adjunct professor and still feeling new to Los Angeles, a city known for its isolating energy. Yet a strange thing happened once I wasn’t allowed to see people: I liked it. Where before I’d pined for company, now I luxuriated in solitude like a hot bath during a New England winter because seeping into my consciousness was an awareness of the incongruities between me and the activities of my life, which I imagine only happened because I was so starkly separated from them.

I’ve been interested in loneliness as a subject of study because I exist at a time when governments are legislating to address it. But quarantine got me