Everybody Examines The Idea That Bodies Can Confine Or Free
W. W. Norton & Company
When Olivia Laing was 22, she came across a flyer advertising a form of alternative healing based on the notion that all illness comes from past trauma. Laing knew this was bald pseudoscience, but the body as a storage unit for emotional distress excited me, she writes in her new book
Everybody: A Book About Freedom. She began to visit the therapist, who promised to work those blocked energies free.
Later, Laing would learn that idea came from the controversial (to say the least) Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who believed that our bodies carry our unacknowledged history, all the things we try to ignore or disavow, in Laing s words. Reich would go on to make other, stranger claims: that orgasms were the key to ending bodily sickness, healing society, even curing fascism. That the universe runs on a kind of life force named orgone, which could be harnessed in an orgone accumulator. H
By Olivia Laing
Norton: 368 pages, $27
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Olivia Laing’s fifth work of nonfiction, “Everybody: A Book About Freedom,” is a compendium of echoes. The approach recalls much of her spirited nonfiction work: “The Trip to Echo Spring,” which traces the link between alcohol and the work of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman and Raymond Carver; or “The Lonely City,” an examination of urban loneliness through the lens of artists Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz, among others.
Olivia Laing, Everybody (2021)Courtesy of Picador
It’s quite a big place to start, but how can we reckon with the problem of existing inside a body?
Olivia Laing: Well, that s the question that made me write the book. I feel like that question has always been quite live to me. The body is the site of so many different experiences. Sometimes we’re happily and delightful embodied and other times, it feels like we re sort of stuck in this prison. And the body has needs, and those needs can be turned against us. The body is a site of violence and, often, it’s a site of violence because of bodily markers that are completely inescapable. Gender, sexuality, race: all of those things can make our bodies a site of violence and they aren t anything to do with who we are as a person, they’re just to do with the kind of body we have.
I sat bolt upright on my bed and called him straight away.
Alberto gives a short, sweet rundown of his life. Originally from Genoa, he maintains a gorgeously rich Italian accent. He is retired, but busy. He learns Mandarin by tape. He rereads interviews with his favourite golden age actors. He cooks. He listens to music, mostly classical, a lot of Verdi. He spends at least 10 minutes every day taking in sunlight from his bedroom window, before completing a self-designed workout, which, from what I understand, is a mix of tai chi, yoga and squats. He tells me this during our first call, prior to which I was anxious, and which, in his quiet, discreet way, Alberto managed kindly and competently. Before I realise it, we have spent 40 minutes talking.