About the Book
A book for our times: a moving meditation on the tension between loneliness and freedom, individualism and love.
At no time before have so many people lived alone, and never has loneliness been so widely or keenly felt. Why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure? And can we ever be happy on our own? Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and for companionship, intimacy and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives - can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book on how we want to live, Alone spent almost a year on Germany's bestseller list.
'The most moving, memorable books are the ones that attempt to answer questions that the author has been struggling with for his entire life. In Alone, Schreiber-a beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker-explores the questions of not just his life, but our age: Who am I if no one loves me? What are the limits of friendship? How does one live with deep and profound loneliness? This is a book for not just this year, but this era.' - Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life
'Schreiber has written a brave and searching vindication of single life, a book about the cultivation and tending of solitude, about solitude as an art. Amid the bewildering loss of everydayness imposed by the pandemic, when solitude was not chosen but enforced, Schreiber creates in these pages a moving conversation - with philosophers and poets, theorists and novelists - about the sources of value in our lives. By multiplying our sense of those sources, by insisting on the dignity of models of life that have sometimes been disparaged, this book finally becomes a document of liberation.' - Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
'This is a book to love and to cherish. Schreiber is such a skilled and engaging writer. Without sentimentality, he digs into the taboo subject of loneliness - societal, personal, existential; the salvation of hiking, the many dimensions of friendship, the solace of literature, the value of kindness, the pleasures of solitude. You will meet Nietzsche, Sappho, Arendt - and perhaps you will meet yourself, walking in the hills, thinking about new ways to live.' - Deborah Levy
'An engrossing meditation on solitary living, as well as an exploration of the enriching connections that can come from loving friendships.' - Anna MacDonald, Paperback Bookshop
Table of Contents:
Living Alone
The Kindness of Strangers
Conversations with Friends
Never So Lonely
Ambiguous Losses
Days in Famara
Bodywork
Farewells
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author :
Daniel Schreiber is the author of Susan Sontag, the first complete biography of the intellectual icon, as well as the highly praised and bestselling German-language literary essays Nuchtern and Zuhause. He lives in Berlin.
Ben Fergusson is an award-winning writer and translator. He is the author of Tales from the Fatherland and An Honest Man.
Review :
Daniel Schreiber's beautifully written Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living.
Schreiber’s arguments and personal reflections beautifully capture our emotional lives; they manage to be both honest and inspiring.
A heartfelt memoir on being single, living alone and the existential experience of loneliness . . .a study of intimacy and independence . . . Alone is also a very personal narrative, one that covers friendship, sexuality, depression and ageing. Schreiber’s observations are heartfelt, particularly the ideas that even the most acute loneliness can bring us something.
Romantic love, suggests the author of this engaging extended essay, is the lone ‘grand narrative’ to have survived seismic societal shifts in modern times . . . He fuses memoir with intellectual flair, quoting from philosophers and psychoanalysts as he considers the lot of a larger than ever group of people. Hermits and intimacy, the taboo of loneliness and the consolation of friendship – all find their place in a meditation that nods to joy and adversity.
Schreiber has previously written a biography of Susan Sontag and several volumes of essays, and this is a work suffused with the essayistic sensibility. It blends passages of memoir with scholarly and literary references to explore the author’s existence as a single gay man who often feels he is living outside standard social models . . . Friendship is, in fact, as much the topic of this book as aloneness. Schreiber writes interestingly about it, drawing a contrast between its polymorphic freedoms and the 'grand narratives' of love and family . . . Alone follows a 'small' spirit itself; it takes only brief dips into its sources, and does not drive towards any climactic answer . . . Beautiful images and insights bounce up along the way.
Daniel Schreiber’s Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living was a surprise bestseller in Germany when it was first published in 2021, now translated into English by Ben Fergusson. In it, Schreiber eloquently digs in to the taboo subjects of loneliness and shame. It has to be said that Alone is not a self-help book; it’s an existential book, and all the more transgressive for it. A hybrid between essay and memoir, the author puts to work the writing of various philosophers and poets, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sappho to examine the vicissitudes of intimacy, solitude, the solace of friendships. Schreiber is interested in the gap between the life we live and the life that we imagined for ourselves. In this sense, Alone is also a conversation about yearning for an unlived life.
The challenges and contours of a life spent largely alone is the subject of Schreiber's reflective, elegantly written book - a bestseller in Germany and recently translated into English. In eight essays, blending personal narrative and psychology, Schreiber explores contemporary solitude . . . Schreiber writes perceptively of the pain of being 'left behind' in love, and of the cumulative effect of routine loneliness and its insidious, stultifying impact on well-being and broader world view. His descriptions of mixed, murky feelings are evocative, moving and often instantly familiar . . . Schreiber applies psychology and sociology carefully, never rushing to flimsy conclusions or reaching for false connections . . . Schreiber's well-read self-reflection elevates Alone. With this thought-provoking, often profound book, he proffers a hand to anyone who may have felt irrevocably, irredeemably alone and says 'me, too'.
Schreiber's European best-seller examines society's and his own attitudes to living outside the romantic ideal of coupledom, while also looking at friendship and loneliness . . . it combines his personal experiences and reflections with philosophical, psychological and cultural insights into the subject of living alone . . . Schreiber writes beautifully about friendships and his own friends . . . Thoughtful, inclusive, and at times poetic, this is a quietly beautiful book that I can imagine many people, alone or coupled, relishing for its insights.
Critically acclaimed German writer Daniel Schreiber was, by the enforced isolation of lockdown in particular, inspired to con- sider the spiritual parameters of loneliness and solitude. Alone, a staggeringly beautiful meditation, is the result . . . Alone is a monograph whose resonance will only increase with time, not only in Australia but throughout the world . . . Schreiber’s melancholy genius, reminiscent of Thomas Mann, is evident on every page. The delicacy of his insights, his quiet dedication to consciousness, and the calibre of his reflections mark him as a writer to treasure.
. . . as the German essayist and cultural critic Daniel Schreiber points out in his newly translated essay collection, Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living, a sort of rolling moral panic over the implications of living alone has been underway for quite a while . . . Schreiber’s set of linked essays underscores the differences between being lonely and being alone, then brings forward the complex and fluid relationship between those states . . . Schreiber’s essays have what I can only describe as a lived-in feel. A few quotations here won’t suffice to convey how many shades of experience - of contentment and gloom and everything in between - show through.
The sheer number of us who are lonely is good news (in a way) for a writer of Daniel Schreiber’s calibre. I’m not surprised that the German essayist and biographer’s poignant and personal exploration of this taboo subject spent nearly a year on Germany’s best-seller list in 2021 . . . Although divided into chapters on different aspects of loneliness . . . the book’s 152 pages read as one long essay on being alone . . . Along the way we are treated to snippets from sociologists, psychologists and writers . . . Schreiber writes movingly about our expectations of what counts as a good life.
Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Schreiber explores the tensions between our desire for solitude and our need for companionship and intimacy. The result is a ‘profoundly enlightening look at loneliness in modern life’.
This is a book to love and to cherish. Daniel Schreiber is such a skilled and engaging writer. Without sentimentality, he digs into the taboo subject of loneliness – societal, personal, existential; the salvation of hiking, the many dimensions of friendship, the solace of literature, the value of kindness, the pleasures of solitude. You will meet Nietzsche, Sappho, Arendt – and perhaps you will meet yourself, walking in the hills, thinking about new ways to live.
An intelligent, moving, and heartfelt meditation on the mixed joys and sorrows of solitude. Schreiber's prose is gorgeous, practically silken, and he wears his erudition so lightly that he is the best possible guide on this journey to the elegant lunar landscape of aloneness.
Daniel Schreiber has written a brave and searching vindication of single life, a book about the cultivation and tending of solitude, about solitude as an art. Amid the bewildering loss of everydayness imposed by the pandemic, when solitude was not chosen but enforced, Schreiber creates in these pages a moving conversation – with philosophers and poets, theorists and novelists – about the sources of value in our lives. By multiplying our sense of those sources, by insisting on the dignity of models of life that have sometimes been disparaged, this book finally becomes a document of liberation.
The most moving, memorable books are the ones that attempt to answer questions that the author has been struggling with for his entire life. In Alone, Daniel Schreiber – a beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker – explores the questions of not just his life, but our age: Who am I if no one loves me? What are the limits of friendship? How does one live with deep and profound loneliness? This is a book for not just this year, but this era.
Oh my god, I tore through this breathtaking book! Alone is gorgeously, sensitively written and yet so explicit in its honesty and vulnerability. I connected with it deeply and personally – I truly loved it.
Schreiber makes a concise intervention into isolation studies with Alone, writing not about what causes increasing numbers of people to live alone, but about the particular joys of solitude, the warmth of rare bonds of friendship, and the opportunity to contemplate and confront the hard edges of one’s own self . . . Schreiber quotes widely from the literature on loneliness and isolation, thinking through his personal and theoretical perplexities with philosophers, social critics, psychoanalysts, and artists. He mixes personal stories from a life he increasingly lives alone with sharp commentary on the lies we tell ourselves about loneliness – and about love. Like solitude itself, Schreiber’s reflections are both ultimately ambivalent and deeply moving. The promises of love and friendship, of deep contentment and belonging, always contain the danger of terrible injury, separation, and loss. The provocative suggestion Schreiber leaves us with is that in being alone, our pain can be the cost of wonderful gain.
