‘Among the most significant voices of our times’ Financial Times
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain…
at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts a dazzling investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom.
Drawing on her own experience in protest and alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she grapples with some of the most compelling figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.
Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized as our own. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
‘A free-wheeling and joyful exploration’ Jack Halbestram
Order in the UK: Amazon, Bookshop.org, Foyles, Waterstones
Order in the US: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop
Events: here
Out now: Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Korean
Coming soon: China, Germany, Sweden, Ukraine, Turkey, Poland
Read: Guardian extract, FT profile, Vanity Fair diary, i-D interview, Dazed interview, 5 books that inspired Everybody, on writing Everybody
Listen: Everybody playlist, Vox podcast, Monocle, Bomb
Watch: Everybody discussions with Maggie Nelson, Sarah Schulman, Helen Mort and Susie Orbach
From the reviews…
‘Laing’s gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words, she is among the most significant voices of our time.’ Financial Times
‘Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. Intensely moving, vital and artful.’ Guardian
‘Everybody possesses a looseness, richness, and abundance of originality…One does not expect a political study to perform such sharp close readings of art and literature, or to describe emotions so elegantly. Line by line and thought by thought, Laing writes with surgical discipline.’ New Yorker
‘Laing is a truly thrilling thinker, with an impressively roving intellectual eye.’ Telegraph
‘Radically subversive and learned’ The Times Literary Supplement
‘A dizzying ride…both timely and beguiling’ The Sunday Times
‘It will delight new and loyal readers alike…an ambitious, absorbing achievement that will make your brain hum’ Evening Standard
‘A quintessential book for the precarious moment we’ve found ourselves in... multilayered and masterfully structured... Everybody should be required reading for anyone who cares about not just where we are now, but the future.’ Washington Post
‘A fleet, gracious tour of bodily distress and joy... Laing writes in great looping sentences, both precise and evocative.’ NPR
‘We are lucky to be living in the time of Olivia Laing... to spend time with Laing as she works through a topic, finding the unlikeliest of connective ideas wherever she looks, is to come away with a view of the world that—if not exactly clearer—is strange and rich and profound.’ LitHub
‘Daring and complicated... The method of Everybody [is] framed as an extended conversation between the author and her sources, in which De Sade blurs into Reich, who blurs into Sontag, and back again. The key to all this movement is that it also invites us to participate in the conversation.’ LA Times
‘A beautiful, strange and sprawling meditation on the relationship between the body and freedom.’ New Statesman
‘Dreaming beyond conventional wisdom and restrictive visions, Laing emboldens us to seek liberation across difference in the face of turmoil. Everybody is a galvanizing book during a time of incredible hesitation.’ Boston Globe
‘Everybody travels buoyantly through a rich swathe of cultural history to investigate bodily freedom and its curtailments… It’s a formidable undertaking, one that Laing executes savvily, her plainly diligent research synthesized in lucid, coolly urgent prose.’ 4 Columns
‘This lucid foray into some of life’s deepest questions astonishes.’ Publishers Weekly starred review
‘Intellectually vigorous and emotionally stirring’ Kirkus starred review
‘Laing’s finely crafted blend of incisive memoir and biography vitalize this unique chronicle of the endless struggle “to be free of oppression based on the kind of body” one inhabits, a work of fresh and dynamic analysis and revelation.’ Booklist starred review
‘Olivia Laing has a genius for juxtaposing ideas and lives – of artists, writers, thinkers, her own too – so that they illuminate each other in fresh, sometimes startling ways. This new book is a triumph. It bristles with energy and understanding as it charts the body’s pleasures and pains, its fragilities, and endurance in the long 20th century. This really is a book for everybody.’ Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad
‘This is an astonishing project, written with equal parts stirring passion and capable intellect. Laing puts into words experiences I had never before seen in print, and the world is better for it. I love this book.’ Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias
‘Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought. Brainy, open-hearted and bold.’ Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse
‘Laing’s particular gift lies in her unique ability to line up unlikely juxtapositions – of artists, ideas and works – and then draw clear and illuminating insights from such constellations. What her earlier work did for loneliness, this book does for liberation.’ Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism
‘Reading Everybody felt like hanging out with my absolute smartest friend having, somehow, the precise conversation I need to have in this historical moment. Olivia Laing’s mind is a thrill to watch . . . Rare is the book that makes you feel more alive just in reading it, but Everybody does just that.’ Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body
‘A provocative inquiry into the body’s power and vulnerability . . . casting fresh light on the unending struggles for freedom and autonomy.’ Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
‘Through [Laing’s] incisive lens, the body – that knot of mind, matter, culture, and society that we dwell inescapably within – becomes almost impossibly fascinating.’ Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine