Another new (final) subtitle!
My US subtitle has changed again, and it’s final this time. The title will be Lonely: A Memoir on Learning to Live with Solitude. I think I like it.
It may sound strange that the title has changed so many times, but here’s a glimpse inside the world of publishing: young writers often don’t control their titles. A title and subtitle have to be approved by layers of people in editing and marketing. You have to be a very established writer to have the clout to go to a publishing house and say, “This is the title. And it’s not changing.” I actually don’t mind the process of revision: it’s interesting to see how other people think about the book.
Another publishing note: I don’t choose any of the headlines or “decks” (the few lines below the headline) for any articles that I’ve written. Again, editors write those. So, if you see something such as “Loneliness swallowed me up,” it’’s an editor at the Guardian writing that, not me.
US book news: a new sub-title for Lonely
It’s happened again, folks. Lonely seems to be a hard book to pin down. Since early 2009, I’ve had publishers on both sides of the border trying to come up with an appropriate subtitle.
In the US, my book is “Lonely: A Memoir,” while in Canada, it’s “Lonely: Learning to Live With Solitude.” This is the only difference between the two books.
My US publisher is now leaning towards my Canadian subtitle, because it has an educational aspect to it (and I do want the book to be educational). But they want to keep the memoir aspect as well. It’s tricky: the book is such a mish-mash of data, personal stories, and interviews, it’s really hard to know what to call it.
My new US title for the paperback will be Lonely: A Memoir on Learning How to Live With Solitude. It’s a mix of the original US and Canadian titles.
Confused? It’s a bit odd for a book to go through so many names, but since I just call it Lonely, I’m trying not to get too fussed about it (I won’t let them change the “Lonely” part.) You can write and share your two cents re the new subtitle, but the boat has pretty much sailed. Once it’s up on Amazon.com (and it is), it’s final. I hope people like it!
It’s loneliness, not depression
When I was talking to potential publishers about Lonely, the question that came up time after time was, “Aren’t you just depressed?” I found this question maddening. I wasn’t depressed. The problem was long-term loneliness. But most of the people around me just assumed I had “the blues.”
I wrote a guest blog for the Huffington Post on this issue a few weeks ago. (Note: I got the name of my book wrong!). My main argument, which I stand by, is that people say they’re depressed because depression isn’t as stigmatized as loneliness, and because depression is less threatening than loneliness. Loneliness, after all, refers to gaps in our social lives, and that inevitably involves other people. It’s precisely the people closest to you who might not want to hear that loneliness is a problem.
I think it’s important to sort out loneliness from depression. Many lonely people are on anti-depressants, whicn they might not actually need. I think that loneliness is harder to treat than depression, but talking about and trying to treat depression when the problem is loneliness won’t amount to much. It’s much better to try to tackle a hard problem than to miss the mark completely, and go after something else.
The social isolation experiment
I was watching the news last night, and it showed six men from different countries voluntarily signing up for months of social isolation. The goal of the experiment is to assess, in part, what happens to people when they’re cut off from social and community ties.
The experiment strikes me as a bit weird (not to mention insanely claustrophobic). I’ve talked to people who are leading lives of real isolation–and they aren’t taking part in any high-profile experiments. Isolation is simply what characterizes their lives — whether they like it or not.
Here’s a crazy idea: Why not take all the money that’s going into the MARS experiment, and put it into researching and building community ties? We already know a lot about social isolation, and we also know that a lot of people are leading wildly isolated lives. The experiment strikes me as socially-blind. There are already hundreds of thousands of people leading lives of involuntary isolation. Maybe we could start paying attention to this fact, and stop pretending that extreme social isolation is something that has to be “constructed” in an experimental setting.
My UCLA Loneliness Scale score
In the early days of writing Lonely, my agent said that I should take the UCLA Loneliness Scale every month or so, and see how my scores turned out. For those who have Lonely, the Scale is reproduced in the book’s introductory pages; for those who don’t have Lonely, the Scale is a test developed by the psychologist Dan Russell to assess how lonely someone might be. The test includes questions such as “How often do you feel starved for company?”, and a final score can range from 10 to 40, with a score of 25 or higher indicating real difficulty with loneliness.
I never followed up on my agent’s suggestion. I grew so familiar with the UCLA Loneliness Scale when writing Lonely that I effectively stopped seeing it. But, feeling lonely here in Newfoundland, I decided to sit down and take it once more. My score today was 30, which reflects, according to Russell, “a very high level of loneliness.”
A reader of Lonely once flamed me (is that what the cool kids say?) for writing a book about loneliness and still being lonely. He wanted, I guess, to hear about loneliness from someone who had totally mastered the state. I think there are some strategies you can bring to bear on loneliness (I’m going to post a lecture by a British researcher on this topic soon), but I’ll say in advance to anyone interested in Lonely that loneliness is still a problem in my life.
I could blog about this for pages and pages, but the very nature of blog posts means I’ll have to wrap this up shortly. I want to do more thinking about the persistence of loneliness in my life: I think it’s really complex and significant. And I’m going to follow my agent’s advice and take the UCLA Loneliness Scale every month, to see if I can spot ebbs and flows in my score. Readers of Lonely might want to do the same, to see whether their score remains static, or whether it dips and rises in response to life events. This won’t solve the problem of loneliness, but it will provide more information about a state that can seem so maddeningly hard to pin down.
Finding Lonely in the UK
A very witty reader of this blog noted the 1 – 3 week wait time for Lonely on Amazon UK, and asked if my NY publisher was taping the books to the backs of seals, and sending them across the ocean that way.
I don’t think seals are involved (that would raise tricky animal welfare issues), but it is true that the books have to travel from the States. That being said, three weeks is the outside time limit: in my experience, people receive the books much more quickly than that.
Writing about loneliness for the Guardian
I was thrilled to get an email from the Guardian a few days ago, asking for an article about my experience with loneliness. The editor and I both agreed that we wanted the piece to be very personal, and I had no trouble writing about the worst aspects of my loneliness. The article is about my past, but since I’ve been feeling really lonely here in Newfoundland, it was easy for me to access those feelings and really tap into them.
I experienced no stigma anxiety while writing the piece, but yesterday afternoon–after the article was submitted–I was sitting on the stairs, and I thought, “What have I done?” I don’t usually think about numbers, but I knew that the Guardian reaches a lot of readers. And then stigma hit–the feeling that I’d admitted to something I was supposed to keep private, that I might be judged, that people would think I was off my rocker.
But I stuck by my mission statement, which (if you’re new to this blog) is to make lonely people feel less alone. I have a lot of people giving me support in admitting to long-term loneliness–my editors, my agent, my publisher–and I thought, You have to do this.
And now that the piece is out there in the world, I’m hearing from people saying thank you, and that makes it all worthwhile.
Loneliness in the Guardian
An article about my experience with long-term loneliness is in this weekend’s Guardian. I’m thrilled! You can access the full article here.
Loneliness, writing, and Twitter
It’s odd. I just wrote a piece for a British newspaper about loneliness, and it was very personal — about the “voices” that overcame me when lonely, the jealousy I felt, the sense I had that I just might disappear. And I was fine with all this — largely because I didn’t know who was going to be reading the article, or when.
What’s interesting (to me at least) is that, when I try to Twitter about loneliness, I freeze up. And I think that’s because I know exactly who’s going to be reading the tweets. The audience is so clear — I have a list of “followers” — that I can imagine the reactions.
This may sound strange, given that I just published a book about loneliness, but I need a sense of privacy in order to confront and overcome the stigma attaching to loneliness. When I blog, or when I write an article, the audience is very broad. You, my readers, are important, but I don’t know when you’ll be reading the posts, or which posts you’ll read, or which ones you might come back to and read again.
I think that loneliness needs “space,” in a sense. I have that on this blog, but not on Twitter. It will be interesting to see if I can overcome stigma on Twitter and be as personal as I am in Lonely, or on this blog. You can follow my tweets if you wish — but if you do, you’ll see it’s a different me emerge, one that’s a lot less personal, and maybe a bit less honest about my loneliness.
Major study on long-term loneliness
Thanks to readers of this blog for drawing my attention to a new major study of loneliness in the UK.
The study covers a lot of the ground that I cover in Lonely, but it has some really new and interesting stats. It found that 11% of the survey group struggled with feeling lonely quite often, and close to 50% saw loneliness as a growing problem in society.
For more than 10% of a sample group to admit to loneliness is a fairly major thing. The figure mirrors numbers I’ve seen for North America, suggesting that a 10% long term loneliness rate is pretty solid.
The report has received a lot of media attention in the UK, and I think this is a good thing. People have been writing to me to say that the report (and loneliness) are all over the airwaves in the UK, and I say, “Fantastic!” Not happy, obviously, that loneliness is a serious problem, but quite pleased to see that loneliness is getting the media attention it needs. More attention, and more voices, will slowly, slowly lead to less stigma.