Eight Books to Comfort You When You’re Lonely
The holidays are a notoriously fraught time for big feelings, loneliness chief among them. In 2017, the surgeon general declared loneliness an American “epidemic,” with “over 40% of adults” in the U.S. suffering from it. Globally, the rates rose even further when the coronavirus pandemic made gathering dangerous.
What makes things tricky is that solitude is not the same as loneliness. Likewise, physical proximity to people is not necessarily an antidote to loneliness, as anyone who has ever felt alone in the company of others knows. The feeling flares when our emotional needs for intimacy and belonging aren’t met.
Thankfully, social encounters aren’t the only way to connect. Perhaps, like me, you find solace or comfort in art. Cinema, sculpture, and theater all fit the bill, but I find there’s nothing quite like the rush of being seen by a book—that sense that the characters are , that the author understands something essential about how it feels to be alive. As the essayist has written, “The weird gift of loneliness is that it grounds us
