This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity

Deming’s (creative writing, Yale; Art of the Ordinary) book is a powerful study of loneliness as both a creative catalyst and a potentially dangerous, damaging facet of those perceived to be loners, outcasts, and misunderstood. The book opens with the author’s visceral response to learning about Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death by suicide and moves through personal reflections that read like meditations about isolation and depression. Readers may find that the book’s descriptions of the pain that comes with these feelings and experiences are far greater and more complex than any quick solution. Chapters delve into a research-driven study of loneliness as an intertwined problem and possibility. The author argues that loneliness engenders powerful creativity, which often paradoxically brings others together as viewers of films, readers of books, and others who vicariously experience it.