6 1GT Thursday August 6 2020 | the times

times

O

livia Laing has

made a career out

of writing about

love and loneliness,

anxiety and art. She

is also, it would

seem, clairvoyant.

Her new book,

Funny Weather, is a collection of

essays about the solace that art can

bring. The subtitle, decided way back

last year, is “Art in an emergency”.

“People have had a huge amount

more time than they would normally

have to think about other things than

work and commuting,” Laing, 43, says

on the phone from home, “but at the

same time it’s been so incredibly

stressful and anxiety-provoking.”

Laing was locked down in

Cambridge with her husband, Ian

Patterson, 71, a poet and Cambridge

English don nearly 30 years her senior,

and has found his vulnerability during

the pandemic stressful. He is

incredibly calm, she says, irritatingly

so, and has taken a sensible line

through the upheaval, not being

consumed by the “terrible anxieties”

with which she has suffered. “He’s

been capable of going out for walks

and not bleaching his hands ten times

when he gets back,” she says.

While some people have succumbed

to torpor, Laing has gone into

hyperdrive. She has completed her

next book, five years after she started,

and written a pitch for another. Life

hasn’t been so very different for her

these past months — she’s in her

study, writing. The difference is that

she should have been out on the road

promoting Funny Weather, “but I hate

that anyway so I’m quite relieved”.

Art exists, she argues, to convey

empathy and tenderness indirectly

from person to person. The internet

has been a substitute of sorts, but

nothing compares to seeing a painting

in a gallery or watching a theatrical

performance live. People have been

intensely lonely and anxious, she adds,

but art can help. “I can’t say, ‘If you

read Dickens it will all be fine,’ but, at

the same time, if you read Dickens, it

helps. The whole thing about art, and

maybe particularly the novel, is that it

is a door out into another world.”

Nor does it have to be highbrow.

Laing has been bingeing on Len

Deighton’s popular Cold War spy

thrillers and describes herself as

“obsessed — completely obsessed”.

She’s also a huge Jilly Cooper fan.

When Patterson’s first wife, Jenny

Funny Weather: Art in

an Emergency by Olivia

Laing, above, is out in

Picador hardback

Diski, was dying of cancer in 2016,

Laing, then a friend, recommended

that he read Cooper. He scoffed and

said that a man in his position couldn’t

possibly. But then he did, and ended

up writing an encomium for the

London Review of Books.

“He found them incredibly

consoling and moving and a source of

pleasure,” she says. “That’s the magic

of what a book can do: it can just lift

you out of such desolate states.” After

the LRB piece came out, Cooper got in

touch and they are now friends. She

even sends Patterson Valentine cards.

“She’s a force for good,” Laing says.

“Everyone should be reading Jilly

Cooper novels right now. Boris

Johnson should have sent a copy of

Riders to every house in the country.”

Laing has become a quietly totemic

figure for a generation of people in

their twenties and thirties struggling

with the digital age and the economic

impact on their futures of the 2008

crash. Her 2016 book, The Lonely City,

about her struggle with life as a single

woman in New York, struck chords all

over the world. Another work, The

Trip to Echo Spring, mused on the

nature of the link between great

literature and alcoholism, exploring

the work of writers including F Scott

Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

She hopes that her new essays will

instil an awareness that we are not

alone. Other people have gone

through dark, difficult experiences,

she says, and dark and difficult

feelings, “but that can be the ground

for making something beautiful and

sustaining for others.”

Laing grew up in Buckinghamshire

until she was four, when her parents

Everyone

should be

reading

Jilly

Cooper

novels

right now

divorced. Her mother came out as

a lesbian, moved with her daughter to

Portsmouth and became involved with

a woman whom Laing has said was

“an alcoholic... a coercive, controlling,

very frightening person”.

Laing turned down a place at

Cambridge and later dropped out of

an English degree at the University of

Sussex to join friends protesting about

a road in Dorset. She found her path

when she got an internship on The

Observer and discovered the joy of

writing. In 2011 she moved to New

York in the wake of a bad break-up.

There, her loneliness and self-doubt

led to The Lonely City, for which she is

best known. Lockdown was a perfect

storm of all the things she has spent

her life thinking and writing about:

love, loneliness, anxiety and art.

“Art has so much power right now,”

she says. “It’s something that speaks

exactly into the kind of needs that

you see on Twitter, on Instagram, that

everyone is experiencing. We’re all

equally vulnerable because we’re all

mortal and we all love people.”

One of her novels, Crudo, was about

whether it is worth learning to love at

all when the end of the world is nigh.

“It took me a while to decide what the

answer to that question was, but yes,

it’s definitely worth it.”

Laing realised when she was in New

York that she might be happier if she

put down roots. She had friends in

Cambridge, so moved there in 2013.

There she met Patterson, whose elegy

for Diski won the Forward Prize for

best single poem in 2017. They were

thrown together after Diski’s death

when Laing’s landlord wanted to

redecorate; she went to stay with him

for three weeks and effectively never

left. The couple married in 2018. Given

her struggles with loneliness, she

found it galling how difficult it was to

live with someone else. Today she says

she has learnt that she likes being

married, while also feeling terrified

that her husband is the same age, and

just as vulnerable, as her parents.

“At times it’s quite overwhelming,

but I also feel incredibly lucky. I spent

so many years of my life alone, and

could so easily have gone through

lockdown alone, but instead I’ve got

this very dear creature. I feel very

blessed, but I’m always in a state of

absolute terror.”

She is haunted by the idea of

people who were trapped in abusive

relationships during the pandemic.

“My husband told me gleefully that as

soon as people came out of lockdown

in Wuhan, hundreds of couples filed

for divorce. But we’ve got on very well.

I’m not divorcing him.”

Years ago she gave up on Twitter

and Facebook, finding the constant

news and vitriol overwhelming. She

loves Instagram and says it helps her

to feel connected to her friends. It has

never been more vital, she argues, that

we take a step back from the news and

the drama and engage with things that

nourish our frazzled brains.

“While we’ve been trapped in our

little chambers there are things we

can do that are enriching. We are not

without resources. The alternative is

to be frantic and terrified, and in some

ways that’s inevitable. But in some

ways it’s also a choice. We can choose

to feel terror or we can choose to

feel something else. Let’s choose

something else.”

She was the guru of loneliness.

Then, finally, she fell in love

Olivia Laing made

her name writing

about isolation.

Now she has a

different fear, she

tells Hilary Rose

MATT WRITTLE/EYEVINE