The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays

Poet and essayist Dixon (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) shines in this heartbreaking reflection on her sense of isolation before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, Dixon was living in a two-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia hundreds of miles from the rest of her family. Then Covid hit, and she feared she may have lost all “connective threads” with other humans. She binged a steady stream of movies, YouTube videos, and true crime podcasts, becoming obsessed with the deaths of three women: Joyce Carol Vincent, who died in front of her TV and was not found for three years; Elisa Lam, who was caught behaving erratically on security footage before she was found dead atop a Los Angeles hotel; and Geneva Chambers, who died in bed and wasn’t discovered for years, largely because she’d alienated her neighbors. Each woman provided a warped cautionary tale onto which Dixon projected her own anxieties. In 16 essays that weave together pop culture, personal history, and poetic musings, Dixon considers the cultural roots of loneliness and illuminates potential paths to salvation. It amounts to an indelible portrait of contemporary isolation that soothes and slices with the same steady hand. (Oct.)