Richard Deming: Exploring and Writing About Loneliness
Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, received the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems, Day for Night, appeared in 2016.
He is also the author of Listening on All Sides, and Art of the Ordinary. He contributes to such magazines as Artforum, Sight & Sound, and The Boston Review, and his poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Field, American Letters & Commentary, and The Nation. Winner of the Berlin Prize, he was the Spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.
Richard Deming
In this post, Richard shares what inspired him to write about loneliness, his top two pieces of writing advice (for himself), and more.
Name: Richard Deming
Literary agent: Elias Altman, Massie & McQuilkin
Book title: This Exquisite Loneliness
Publisher: Viking
Release date: October 3, 2023
Genre/category: Narrative Nonfiction
Previous titles: Let’s Not Call It Consequence; Listening on All Sides; Day for Night; Touch of Evil; Art of the Ordinary
Elevator pitch for the book: Both in the author’s own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, This Exquisite Loneliness explores how we might transform the pain of emotional isolation and become more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.
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What prompted you to write this book?
A few years ago, I was in the midst of writing an essay about the movie Synecdoche, New York. It’s a film that’s always been important to me, and it’s really about loneliness and depression. A friend called to say that the star of the movie, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, had unexpectedly, tragically died. Essentially, I have experienced feeling lonely most of my life and it was a significant part of my struggles with substance abuse when I was younger.
Hoffman’s death brought home, in a real and undeniable way, just how powerful an impact that feelings of isolation and separation can have on us, even if we do have friends and relationships. I realized I wanted—perhaps even needed—to learn as much as I could about loneliness and how others had experienced it and created things from what they went through.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Essentially it took about three or four years, though I had written essays about loneliness before that and those served to give me a sense of what questions I needed to take on in order to write something longer, something more sustained. In that way, I didn’t go into writing to defend a particular thesis, so much as I wanted to gather observations and follow threads. The idea that creativity offered the means of not only expressing loneliness but of creating empathy around and out of loneliness was one that arose as I looked at different figures.
The list of people I focused on did change as I wrote, especially since I wanted to explore how a range of creative people experienced loneliness and what they did to negotiate its demands in different forms and modes. I wanted to come at the subject from various angles.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Publishing something new is always a learning process, or at least that has been my experience. You hand something off to an agent or an editor and then have to reckon with what someone else—someone who isn’t just you—experiences in reading your words. Things you think are obvious or even too much, other people might find as too opaque, and vice versa.
Or things that you think are funny come across as poignant or harrowing. The process is always a kind of collaboration at that stage, and working with others always brings surprises about what you do or don’t take for granted as a writer. It’s complicated, but in some ways it is the most meaningful stage.
That is why good editors and good agents—and good writerly friends—are so incredibly valuable. They help you really isolate the best of the ideas and bring them forward. Writing is a lonely business, but publishing is necessarily collaborative.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I tend to like to try out new challenges with each book, thematically as well as formally. In this case, for instance, I hadn’t ever really written much in terms of biographical narrative before. Most things I’ve written have either been ideas-driven essayistic engagements, critical explorations, or lyric poems. In writing about loneliness I knew I had to tell people’s stories—mine and other people’s—in order to really get to understand what loneliness has done to impact people’s lives. That’s more of a learning process than a surprise though.
What surprised me was just how widespread the feeling of loneliness is, and for how long it has been a true problem that hasn’t really been addressed with the level of seriousness it demands. It also became evident that the patterns of feeling isolated establish themselves really early on in people’s lives—often from nearly the very beginning of what they can remember.
I think what surprised me the most was how often people would pull me aside and confess how often they have felt lonely themselves. From curators to artists to copyeditors, people would share with me, quietly, their own experiences. That was incredibly moving and humbling.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Ultimately, I hope that people will find that they aren’t alone in their feelings of loneliness. I also want to keep mounting the argument that loneliness isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s so common, so pervasive, and has reached epidemic proportions, as even the U. S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has described the impact of loneliness. Yet there’s this prevailing idea that we shouldn’t admit to it.
Feelings of isolation and alienation can be the catalysts to learn about ourselves, to look inward and deepen an understanding of what we want and need from ourselves, from other people. In reading about what people such as Zora Neal Hurston, Rod Serling, Walter Benjamin, Melanie Klein, Walker Evans contended with in their own lonely lives, and created out of their own loneliness gives us a sense of what we can build out of feeling so alone—we can build something helpful, meaningful, something moving to others.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Ironically, even though I teach, I don’t really often give general advice because the writing process is so unique for everyone. There are two things I do offer as advice to myself all the time, however.
The first is something the actor James Cagney once said when he was asked about the secret to acting. “Plant your feet, look the other person in the eye and tell the truth.” I think that’s essentially what writing is all about as well.
The other piece of advice is that people always say, “Write the thing that’s in you to write.” I’ve come to think you should write the thing that you need to read. That way, even if there’s no audience, you have created something that is likely to help you yourself.
Paradoxically, operating that way also gets you outside of yourself because you end up writing something that is somehow beyond what you already know and feel and think. That’s no small thing.