Olivia Laing's The Lonely City: How Hopper, Warhol, Darger and Wojnarowicz Shape a Visual Memoir

Key facts

• Olivia Laing's The Lonely City was published by Canongate in 2016; the Italian translation Città sola was published by Il Saggiatore in 2018, translated by Francesca Mastruzzo, with a 2024 reissue.
• The book examines Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz as artists whose visual procedures shape Laing's autobiographical writing.
• Hopper lived and worked for over forty years with Josephine Nivison, who posed for almost all his female figures and managed his career while being marginalized as an artist.
• Warhol called his tape recorder his 'wife' and used recording devices to mediate social contact; he was shot in 1968, and his scars and surgical corset revealed a concrete vulnerability.
• Henry Darger worked as a hospital orderly in Chicago, attended Mass sometimes several times a day, and obsessively recorded weather; his The Story of the Vivian Girls (c. 1910–1927) remained unknown during his lifetime.
• David Wojnarowicz's series Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978–1979) features a paper mask of Rimbaud worn by anonymous bodies in marginal urban spaces.
• Wojnarowicz photographed Peter Hujar's face, hands and feet after Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, a gesture of intimacy and refusal of erasure.
• Laing's book engages with theoretical works including Heffernan's Museum of Words (1993), Didi-Huberman's Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992), Mitchell's Picture Theory (1994), Louvel's Poetics of the Iconotext (2011), Cavarero's Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti (1997) and Smith and Watson's Reading Autobiography (2010).
• Olivia Laing, born 1977, is a British writer; her Crudo won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2019.