About Emily White

I’m a former lawyer who now works as a writer. I came to writing in a slightly haphazard way. All through law school, I longed to be a writer. I told myself that the feeling would go away when I started practicing law, but the reverse happened: the feeling intensified. There was a bookstore across the street from my law firm, and I used to go there during my lunch hour, feeling weak at the knees when I looked at new books. I loved holding them, and feeling how neat and hefty they seemed in my hand. I started writing anywhere, on anything, whenever I could: I have a series of almost illegible notebooks filled out on bumpy bus-rides to work, and I have way, way too many short stories that I wrote in the evenings at my kitchen table.

Somewhere in the midst of all this scribbling, my loneliness became overwhelming, and I realized that I needed to be writing about my own isolation. Once I made the decision to document my loneliness, my life completely changed. I quit my incredibly good job (do you know how much fun it is to say you’re an “environmental protection lawyer”? Everyone smiles and wants to pat you!), and I devoted myself to the full-time study of loneliness. Along the way, I taught law at the college and university level part-time, and also wrote a lot of legal journalism.

For many years, I lived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, but am now back in my home town of Toronto. Since 2010, I’ve seen Lonely published in nine countries, and have written about loneliness, friendship, and social isolation for publications such as The Guardian, the Daily Mail, ELLE UK, ELLE South Africa, the New York Post, the Huffington Post, the National, Women’s Health (Australia), and Zoomer. Lonely was reviewed internationally and I’ve spoken about loneliness with journalists and reporters from an amazing number of time zones. I now spend a lot of time thinking about foster dogs and am at work on my next book.