Book: WRITING FROM THE SOLITARY: AN ANTHOLOGY ON LONELINESS
Edited by Semeen Ali and Priyanka Sarkar
Published by: Simon & Schuster/Yoda
Price: Rs 399
At a time when loneliness is an epidemic, diagnosed, measured and medically indexed, Writing From the Solitary resists the temptation to treat it as a singular malaise. Edited by Semeen Ali and Priyanka Sarkar, this anthology approaches loneliness not as a deficit to be cured, but as a terrain to be explored in ways that are intimate, political, and deeply shaped by the worlds we inhabit.
Across poems, essays and short fiction, loneliness appears in multiple registers: as urban estrangement, as the quiet ache of womanhood shaped by inherited expectations and age-old customs and traditions, as the afterlife of grief, as chosen refuge, as creative solitude and also as balm to old aches. In Jamuna Bini’s short story, “Nalai”, translated from Hindi by Pooja Sancheti, loneliness stems from being the “ideal” daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, from being in a loveless marriage, or is the result of one’s refusal to enact those scripts.
In the conversation between Jeet Thayil and Nilanjana S. Roy, we get to see loneliness through the window of a writer who essentialises it as creative solitude, as something acutely desirable and meaningful, and even as resistance against the market-induced pace. Thayil goes to the length of provoking us to think if such loneliness could be anti-fascist, or perhaps a revolution.
Sumana Roy explores the physical manifestation of loneliness in terms of living alone in a city, grappling with the possibility of dying alone, while Manjiri Indurkar digs into its digital manifestations through the circus of dating apps and, more so, the desire of being with someone who sees you, understands you, and wants you.
The anthology refuses to flatten these experiences into a universal mood. Instead, it insists that loneliness is lived differently depending on who one is, where one stands, and what one has been taught to endure. What is striking is the book’s refusal to sentimentalise solitude. The writing is raw without being indulgent. In some pieces, loneliness is a suffocating inheritance produced by
age-old traditions that discipline women into silence, endurance and self-erasure. Here, solitude is not a choice but a consequence: of patriarchy, of social conformity, of being unable to speak one’s interior life aloud. In others, loneliness becomes a fragile act of reclamation. To step away, to sit alone, to refuse constant availability, these gestures read as small rebellions in a culture that demands emotional labour without pause.
The anthology is particularly attentive to how loneliness is negotiated rather than simply suffered. Writers return to the ways in which it is metabolised: through writing, through memory, through ritual, through the body. Loneliness, in these pages, is not always the absence of company; sometimes it is the absence of recognition. Sometimes it is the gap between who one is expected to be and who one is becoming. And sometimes it is a room one enters willingly; to think, to grieve, to heal.
There is also a quiet sociological intelligence running through the collection. Without turning didactic, the pieces gesture to the structures that produce isolation, like urban anonymity, familial expectations, societal expectations, gendered labour, generational silences. The anthology suggests that loneliness is rarely purely personal. It is shaped by classed spaces, by gendered norms, by the choreography of modern life. Yet it is rendered here through story and metaphor rather than theory, allowing readers to feel its textures rather than merely understand them.
Importantly, Writing from the Solitary does not resolve loneliness into redemption. It allows for ambiguity, and each story leaves readers to take from it what they may. For some, loneliness remains an ache; for others, it becomes a bitter-sweet companion. What binds the collection is its attentiveness to subjectivity, to the ways people name their own aloneness, reinterpret it, even embrace it. In giving loneliness so many voices, the anthology achieves a quiet paradox: it makes loneliness communal. To read these pieces is to recognise that what feels most isolating may in fact be widely shared, though never identically lived.
In a world that urges us to perform connection constantly, this book offers something gentler and braver. It grants permission to dwell in the loneliness, and to ask what it is made of. It allows the readers to make sense of their inner worlds and also the world around them.