Chapter One
PREMONITION
Waiting for the state to strike

I’ve had periods of loneliness my whole life. Since research shows a genetic basis for loneliness, with some people being born with an ingrained tendency toward the state, I now see these periods as natural, almost inevitable. Or, rather, I see them as inevitable from the perspective of the adult I’ve become. I’m the sort of person who likes to play “What if?” What if I hadn’t dropped physics? What if I’d married my first boyfriend? What if Henry Ford had mass-produced bicycles instead of cars? And I can engage in this sort of shuffling and reshuffling of reality when it comes to my loneliness. I can daydream about a childhood in which my sisters and I were closer in age, and my parents stayed together, and my whole family remained in the South. In this way, I can whip up an alternate version of my life, one in which my genetic predisposition toward loneliness doesn’t slam up against the experience of early isolation.

But the fact is that I was a solitary child born into circumstances that saw me too much alone. I don’t mean that I was friendless. One of the overriding ironies of my life has been that, although I’ve struggled with loneliness for years, sociability has rarely been a problem for me. I grew up with much older sisters—Christine and Theresa were ten and eight years older than me—and while the age gap set us apart, it also meant I had the benefit of role models. By the time I was nine, I had the manners of a much older child. I knew how to be polite with parents, deferent with teachers, and funny with friends. I had a best friend—a beautiful Trinidadian girl with the pretty name of Stacey Lea—and other girls used to crowd around me in the schoolyard, asking if they could be my second best friend, or my third. This sort of flattery never made me disdainful or vain, and that’s because the isolation that characterized the other aspects of my life worked to keep my little ego in check. I’m not sure exactly when I became conscious of my motivations, but I realized fairly early on that the reason I was better than other girls at making friends was because I needed those friends more acutely.

This was something the kids around me didn’t seem to notice. Stacey, for instance, had a big, sprawling house. It was a bungalow that had sprouted additions as the family grew and grew, and the erratic architecture made it an ideal place for playing, with an unfinished attic, blind spots in the yard, and dead-end hallways that could be cordoned off with sofa cushions. Stacey used to like a game where we dared each other to climb into a crawl space under the kitchen—it was a damp and gravelly spot that smelled of soil—and she never seemed to realize how uncomfortable the game made me.

“I’m here,” she’d call out, as I cringed with nerves at the entrance, afraid she might just disappear. “I’m putting my clip down as a marker. You have to pass it,” she’d say victoriously, emerging from the crawl space with dirt in her hair and cobwebs stuck to her sweater. And I could never do it. A foot or two into the crawl space, with daylight just an arm’s length away, I’d panic, and scurry back out. “You have no guts,” Stacey would say dismissively, already forgetting the game and heading up to the kitchen, and I’d follow along, patting the big German shepherd that slept on the stairs and not letting on how frightened I’d been.

Because what Stacey didn’t know—and what she, with five brothers and sisters, would probably never understand—was that I had a fear of empty places, a fear that I recognized as embarrassing and irrational even at ten. There seemed to be two versions of my life. There was the public version, which saw me eating cabbage rolls at Stacey’s huge dining room table, playing dodgeball at school, and reading the notes that the girl behind me would slip over my shoulder in class. And then there was another version, the one which I think my friends’ mothers detected but which no one ever mentioned. This other me, this private me, saw me on my own a great deal of the time—unlocking the back door after school and calling out to the cat for company, or going to the corner store on my own, or sitting on the back porch in the early evenings and fiddling with marbles when the empty house became too dark and scary.

In many ways, I had it easy as a kid. Not only was I popular, but my family was reasonably affluent, and I saw none of the abuse or put-downs that some of my other friends had to deal with. The difficulties I faced had nothing to do with people behaving badly toward me and had everything to do with people not being there at all.

The 1970s—which saw families start to seriously fall apart—also witnessed the beginning of the vogue for family trees. My third-grade teacher had a particular fondness for these creations—they must have eaten up a lot of class time—and she made us cut leaves out of bristol board and glue them onto painted trunks and branches. There wasn’t a lot of sensitivity, within the Catholic school system in the mid-1970s, to the fact that some family trees had blown apart, and I had to muster all of my precocious social skills to deal with the challenge.

“Mrs. Twaite,” I said, holding a “Mother” leaf and a “Father” leaf. “What if they’re not on the same tree anymore?”

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Twaite answered. I blushed, and Mrs. Twaite seemed to come to her senses. My sisters and I were famous—we were the “divorced kids”—and Mrs. Twaite was clearly unsettled by our lack of conformity.

“Maybe you can create a second tree,” she said uncomfortably.

I looked around the classroom. There was no way I was going to have two trees when everyone else just had one, so I defiantly glued “Mother” next to “Father.” I liked the way the tree looked—with the mommy and daddy leaves hovering protectively over the little kid leaves—but when I hung it up on the wall, I knew it was a lie. I had no memory of ever seeing my mother and father together, and when I thought about our family tree, I pictured something being dismantled, like the artificial pine my mother and I took apart every Christmas.

It hadn’t always been that way. There seemed to be two families in my family. First, there was the intact unit that my sisters had spent their childhoods in. This was in Kentucky, before the move to Canada and the divorce. This grouping had seen my sisters and parents living in a big white house in Lexington, on a street with the magical-sounding name of Sycamore Road. My mother kept a photo of this house tucked in a drawer in Toronto, and I used to study it when I was little. I’d look at my sisters standing in matching white dresses on the sunny front steps, at the big oak tree in the corner of the frame, and the edge of my father’s shadow in the foreground. There was a peacefulness to this portrait that mesmerized me. I always tried to insert some image of myself into the frame—perhaps looking out from an upstairs window—but I could never fully convince myself that I belonged in the picture. And that’s because, even though I held the photo in my hand, the move to Canada seemed to have ripped its contents in two. Perhaps the absence of aunts and cousins had revealed fault lines within their marriage, but—for reasons that were never explained to me—my parents split up shortly after the move, when I was four. The divorce meant that I saw my father only on Sunday afternoons, and that I saw my mother barely at all. Confronted with the sudden demands of single parenting, she had to hustle for work, and she ended up teaching English as a second language to other newcomers at a college downtown. Her hours, as well as the long commute, meant that she was often not at home, and her absence meant that I had to be self-sufficient.

“You never gave me any trouble,” my mother said fondly, years later, and what she really meant was that I could get by on my own. I relied a lot on Theresa for company in my early childhood—Christine left for university when I was eight—but, as we grew older, Theresa became understandably preoccupied with boyfriends and band rehearsals. By the time I was nine, I’d become adept at entertaining myself. In many ways, it was something I was good at. The relationship between loneliness and solitude can be hard to delineate: the former is often seen as canceling out the legitimacy of the latter, as though a lonely adult or child is simply not entitled to want or need time alone. But the feelings of isolation that accompany loneliness are entirely different from the more sated and creative feelings that accompany solitude, and it’s entirely reasonable to feel lonely and yet still feel as though you need some time to yourself.

“If you don’t want to stay, say yes,” my mother would quietly instruct me, when I called from a friend’s house to ask permission for a sleepover. My mother liked time alone as much as I did, and she never criticized my desire for solitude.

“Yes,” I’d reply, trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible.

“Sorry, hon,” she’d say more loudly, “I need you at home tonight.”

And when I got home to find my mother there, I’d be entirely happy to lose myself in daydreams about being the Hardy Boys’ little sister, or I’d just lie on my bed and listen to my mother writing letters and diary entries on the big electric typewriter downstairs.

The problem was that the solitude I enjoyed when my mother was at home disappeared completely when I was on my own. And this meant that what my family saw was a contented aloneness, while what I experienced, when there was no one else in the house with me, was a frightened isolation. On weekday afternoons and evenings—when my mother was still hours from the end of her workday, and Theresa was at the mall with her friends—I’d fall prey to all the habits and superstitions of a child left too much on her own. I’d refuse to go to upstairs. I’d race to the downstairs bathroom and then scurry back up to the main floor as quickly as possible. I’d try to stay rooted in the kitchen, where I could keep an eye on both the front and back doors, on guard against possible intruders, and I had long, nervous talks with my imaginary twin brother, Randy, someone I suspected I should have gotten rid of years earlier but whose presence comforted me.

The person who was best positioned to respond to the isolation I was experiencing was my father. As a university professor, he had flexible hours, and the fact that he had remarried quickly and well meant that he wasn’t struggling with the feelings of isolation and distress that seemed to trouble my mother. The problem was that the court had limited access to Sunday afternoons, and my father didn’t seem to know what to do with me during such a short time period.

“Isn’t that terrific?” he’d ask, as we stood in the atrium of the Toronto art gallery, staring at an enormous canvas. I can still see this painting precisely. It’s a late 1960s Ellsworth Kelly print of a huge blue circle against a pure white backdrop. I’d be hard-pressed to say something intelligent about this painting now, and when I was eight, I was absolutely dumbfounded. Standing with my father’s hands on my shoulders, I’d fall silent, and my father would misinterpret my confusion as dissatisfaction. He’d grow anxious that I wasn’t enjoying myself, and I’d feel guilty at having let him down. Our Sunday afternoons together were often marked by a sort of cool emptiness: we were often in drafty museums, or barnlike auction houses, or half-deserted restaurants. There was an enervation to our outings—I think both of us would rather have been tucked up inside somewhere, reading—and I often only relaxed on the drive home, when I could close my eyes and gobble up my dad’s sheer presence. I’d breathe in the smell of him—spicy shaving lotion mixed with the scent of his clean cotton shirt—and imagine a more ordinary life in which he woke me in the mornings, and read me stories, and stroked my hair when I was tired.

But the drives with my father always ended. We’d pull into the driveway of my mother’s house, and I’d open the car door to let in the cold air. “I’ll see you next week,” my father would say, not quite looking at me, and I’d head in our big front door to find my mother in the kitchen, half listening to the radio and making sandwiches for the week ahead. The sight of her alone at the counter always filled me with a sense of dread, with a feeling I’d later learn to call a premonition. It was as though, in witnessing her isolation, I was seeing the shape and content of my own future, as though exposure to her loneliness would further guarantee the advent of mine.

Because despite her gifts—her intelligence, her generosity, and her surprising wit—my mother’s life was marked then by a sort of isolation. What little family she had was in the States, her husband had left her, and she spent her days working with people who didn’t speak English. Her flat, midwestern accent was wrong in Toronto, she was an atheist in a Catholic neighborhood, and she was divorced at a time when you weren’t supposed to be. Sometimes I used to find her in the kitchen—like me, she found it a comforting spot—and she’d be asleep with the lights on, her head resting gently on her arms, a day of work and night school having left her exhausted. Although it shames me to admit it, I don’t think I went to her at these times. I was not so sturdy a child as to lead my own mother to bed. Instead, I’d leave her sleeping and tiptoe back to my own room, where I’d be acutely aware of the emptiness in the house, of the way it seemed to echo around my mother and me in our separate spaces.

I don’t want to suggest that I was lonely all the time as a child. I wasn’t. There were perfectly normal moments of sitting with my eyes closed as Theresa practiced her makeup skills on me, or letting my mother brush and braid my hair, or racing with Stacey on our banana-seat bikes. The problem wasn’t that I was always lonely, but rather that loneliness had presented itself right at the beginning of my life, just as I was starting to define myself. There was no time for me to assemble a self-portrait in which loneliness was not a prominent feature. And this meant that my relationship with loneliness became charged. I couldn’t dismiss the state. I came to feel, from a very young age, as though it had a special significance for me, as though it were a fuse that was set to ignite.

“I can’t see this changing,” I wrote when I was nineteen, a year after I’d left my mother’s house and headed to university. I was caught, at the time, in the difficult interval that many young people face. I’d given up most of my high-school friendships and was trying to create new and more complex relationships in a city hours from home. This transition is challenging enough to trigger loneliness in just about anyone. What was unique about my reaction was the way in which short-term and perfectly understandable feelings of loneliness seemed to portend something much worse. “All I can see is more loneliness,” I noted in the diary I’d begun keeping. “Just more solitude, a life lived at a distance from everyone else.” My descriptions of the state, even when it had barely settled, were full of alarm and intensity. The feeling, I wrote, was “knife-like”; it was something “poised to spill my own blood.”

There are two ways of approaching statements of this sort. On one hand, they display all the melodrama I was prone to in those years. I didn’t, in my late teens and early twenties, seem able to turn my emotional volume down: even without drugs, snow crystals were endlessly mesmerizing and conversations wildly intense; a documentary about the porn industry could send me into a tailspin about women’s rights that lasted for weeks. On the other hand, I was, in the course of all my private scribbling, actually making predictions that came true. In a way that makes me slightly uneasy now, I can turn to pages that are twenty years old—soft, worn sheets pulled from coil-ring notebooks and covered with my eager script—and see myself setting out a great deal of what would eventually happen to me. “I’ll never have children. I’ll never marry. The idea of law school seems deadly to me.” It was as though, during that brief interval when everything was rushed and new, a sort of chronological porthole opened up, and I was able to catch glimpses of what my future would hold.

And loneliness was part of that picture. In the same way that other women might worry—even at nineteen—about never finding a husband, I worried about becoming lonely. Saying that I suspected, in my teens and early twenties, that severe loneliness was going to emerge a problem in later years sounds slightly fatalistic. It’s as though I simply internalized the image of my lonely mother and wasn’t imaginative enough to conjure up a different sort of life. There’s certainly some truth to saying my mother’s modeling of loneliness was powerful, and that I’ve been subconsciously battling it for years. But my awareness of and sensitivity to loneliness went further than that. People with mood disorders often write about having emotionally intense childhoods, of being unnaturally prone to highs and lows, crying uncontrollably, or being queerly elevated by a shift in the weather. And if we accept that loneliness is a psychological problem in its own right—which is what researchers are trying to impress on us—then I don’t think it’s unusual or impossible for someone to have a sense of that problem gaining a foothold in their life. When I became lonely in my late teens and early twenties, I was aware of what I can only describe as the edges of something. It was as though I were seeing someone at a distance and through a crowd, and this stranger was waving patiently at me, confident that in time we’d draw much closer together.

By my midtwenties, I’d turned into someone who wasn’t chronically lonely so much as chronically alert to the risk of loneliness. In much the same way that depressives try to organize their lives so as to avoid the blues—exercising obsessively and getting precisely eight hours of sleep a night—I grew into someone who put the need to avoid loneliness at the center of my life. My first attempt to stave off loneliness involved moving in with a sweet, insanely rich, and paternal redhead named Martin, who was the son of a stockbroker but who had the distinctly rural ambition of becoming a folksinger. He was rumpled, with the J. Crew shirts his mother bought for him falling out of his jeans, and he was talented, but full of insecurities that he tried to offset by finding stories of unlikely success.

“Did you know, sweetie,” he’d say, lying on the futon we used as a couch, tipping his cigarette into the ashtray settled on his belly, and reading the insert from a cassette, “that John Prine used to be a postman?”

“See,” I’d reply, as positively as possible, “anyone can do it. It’s not your background that matters so much as how good you are. And you are good.”

He was: he had a low, smoky voice, one of the most gorgeous I’ve ever heard, and my encouragement of him was sincere. I helped him with his application for a music management program, scanned the lyrics he jotted on the backs of cigarette packs, and cooked while he sang and strummed guitar in our back bedroom. Helping Martin certainly went some ways toward easing my feelings of aloneness. Experts agree that “nurturing” others, in the form of teaching, child-raising, or fostering stray animals, is an excellent antidote to a sense of isolation. The problem was that, in supporting Martin’s dreams of becoming a musician, I wound up pushing him into a world that I couldn’t enter. I didn’t like the smoky bars late at night, or the rehearsals that saw Martin’s friends using my pots and dried bean jars as instruments. I couldn’t handle the endless drinking, and I never knew how to respond to the strange mix of calculation and dissolution that characterized the booking agents and talent scouts Martin was always trying to impress.

We lived a few blocks away from the law school at the University of Toronto. I used to pass it twice a day on the bus on my way to work at a film library. I liked the calm air of it, the way it was surrounded by manicured lawns and wrought iron gates. I’d seen legal dramas, such as Law & Order, and I thought of law as offering a sort of enforced collegiality. When I thought about becoming a lawyer, I pictured long, intense evenings around boardroom tables, hurried conversations in courthouse hallways, and whispered talks behind closed office doors.

“At least you’ll have a paycheck,” Martin remarked one night, as I sat beside a timer and scribbled out answers to LSAT questions. It seemed clear to us both that, in applying to law school, I was choosing a different sort of life over the one he was offering. Oddly, we never really argued about this. Martin seemed resigned to my impending departure; what seemed to bother him was the fact that I was leaving him for something so curtailed and dull.

“Some of us don’t have trust funds,” I replied, rather sharply, and Martin shrugged, as though his wealth had nothing to do with him.

“You could make money some other way.”

“It’s not about money, Martin.”

“What’s it about, then?” His question was entirely genuine. Martin was—to this day—the most gregarious person I’ve ever met. He didn’t have a circle of friends so much as a pack of people who followed him to and fro wherever he went. Being at home with me was as close to alone as he ever came.

“You wouldn’t understand,” I replied, and as soon as I said this, I realized I didn’t quite understand it myself. I didn’t have any real interest in law, and the analytical exercises I was doing struck me as empty and hollow. What I was going for was togetherness, a sort of bounded camaraderie which—much like the army—would see me dressing and behaving like everybody else. Although I could never have said so to Martin, who was socially gutsy, what I was looking for was a buffer, a shortcut into a life so intensely peopled that loneliness couldn’t find me.

At least initially, my little feint against loneliness worked. In my first two years of law school, I was abundantly social, and happy to be surrounded by smart people with big ambitions. Loneliness, of course, continued to present itself, but I actively engaged in what I’d later recognize as cognitive behavioral therapy. When a negative thought about loneliness presented itself, I tried to counter it with a more objective assessment of the situation. If I saw others leaving a classroom without me, I’d tell myself that I’d been slow getting my books, and that I shouldn’t interpret their departure as a sign of anything meaningful. Sitting alone in the library hour after hour, I’d force myself to actually write down my list of friends, in order to counter the familiar voice saying I was friendless.

The problem I ran into in those years wasn’t a lack of sociability so much as a failure to connect. I made a very close friend during first year—a sweet human rights campaigner named Laura, a girl so attuned to injustice that she cried during a mock trial—but for the most part there was a gap between me and the other students.

“How is it that we’re able to do this?” asked Brian, a law student I dated in second year. He was sinewy and handsome, and we were hiking along the edge of a sunlit field an hour north of Toronto. The field was part of a network of trails, all of which crossed private land, and Brian seemed preoccupied with trying to identify the mechanism that gave us free access to other people’s property.

It’s an easement, I thought, dutifully calling up the right term. But the thought of saying the word, of polluting the bright day with talk of laws and rules, seemed exhausting to me. There was a dog rushing toward us on the trail up ahead—the sun glinting off its neat black coat as its paws pounded the dust—and I tried to turn the conversation away from property rights.

“It’s a Lab,” I said enthusiastically. “Did you have dogs when you were little?”

“No. But think. If one of us got hurt right now, who would we sue, the province or the farmer?”

Conversations such as these would leave me feeling half drowned, as though I’d just woken from a dream in which everyone else was speaking a different language. And I couldn’t even blame Brian for being a stiff. He was doing exactly what a law student was supposed to be doing—filtering everything through the sieve of a new vocabulary. I was the one who was, in a sense, refusing to engage with reality. I had daydreams of being a writer, and I’d often leave the law library, cross the street to a different college, and hide in its American literature section, perched on one of the little metal stools that most people use for standing on. I found a novel called Anywhere But Here, and the title seemed to capture the ambivalence I was beginning to feel about my situation. I’d walk into a three-hour securities lecture, look at the students swapping business magazines and doing penny trades on their laptops, and make a wish: Anywhere but here. The phrase became a mantra that popped up whenever I found myself trapped in a conversation about shareholder rights, or interviewing with a tax lawyer, or attending a wine and cheese reception and listening to a senior partner talk about his boat.

There are two lines of thought about the relationship between loneliness and depression. Some people see long-term loneliness as leading to the noonday demon, with aloneness taking such an emotional toll on the lonely person that he eventually runs out of resources and succumbs to chronic feelings of the blues. But it’s also been shown that an episode of depression can leave someone more vulnerable to loneliness. Since it curtails the ability to socialize, creates a certain degree of secrecy, and can hasten the arrival of a double or triple self—in which some people are privy to certain facts, while others aren’t—depression can be seen as a “predictor” of loneliness, with a bout of the blues increasing the likelihood that loneliness will follow in the years to come.

And it was depression that I hadn’t counted on when I’d been drawing up plans for how to sidestep aloneness. In retrospect, I think my failure to connect with people at law school disappointed me, and the constant sense of not saying the right things and not appreciating the right ideas reminded me of all of those afternoons with my father, when I hadn’t been able to enjoy the paintings and sculptures he was trying to entertain me with. Law school comes with a future mapped out—you do your clerkship at one firm, find a job at a different firm, then become a partner—and my inability to imagine myself partaking of this future quickly collapsed into an inability to foresee any future at all. I began sleeping ten to twelve hours a day; my hands shook; I developed a genuine anorexia, in which food tasted like chalk; and it soon became routine for me to start crying the minute my apartment door was closed and my book bag hit the floor.

“Do you feel you might do something?” asked Laura gently, standing in her winter coat and not complaining about the cold. I’d called her from my apartment in the middle of my clerkship at a large litigation firm. It was late at night, midweek, and I’d been overcome by a sense of panic, by a powerful feeling that something bloody and dreadful was about to materialize. Laura had taken a cab to my apartment, and then hustled me into a second cab, which had deposited us on the big wide sidewalk in front of one of Toronto’s hospitals.

“Do you want me to go get someone?” she asked, reaching for my elbow. She had on a bright red hat and scarf, and I remember thinking how cheerful she looked, and how wrong it was of me to infringe on her happiness.

“It’s OK,” she stressed, reading my mind. I felt suddenly exhausted, and began to cry. Even though I’d been the one who’d suggested the hospital, the prospect of stepping into the emergency ward, with its bright lights and injured people, struck me as suddenly undoable.

“Maybe we’ll go home,” I said weakly.

“I’ll go with you,” Laura said, without hesitation. “And make you some hot milk.” She stepped toward the road to call for the third cab of the evening, but then turned back to me with an ultimatum. “We’re only going if you agree to get help. Do you agree?” she asked, in a very lawyer-like tone.

I did. I saw my GP for a psych referral, and in late 1999 was sent to one of the most shockingly attractive men I’d ever seen. In his midforties, with loose brown curls and a perfectly urbane fashion sense—cashmere sweaters, pressed trousers, Prada shoes—he diagnosed me as clinically depressed. After my symptoms stabilized, and I’d mastered the trick of looking at him without blushing, he suggested not just continued medication but the full removal of myself from the environment that was distressing me. My clerkship had to last twelve months, and there was no way I could lobby for a shorter period. There was no real requirement, however, that the whole year had to be spent at the same office.

“Can’t you go somewhere else?” Dr. R. asked, writing out another prescription for Zoloft.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well,” he replied, handing over the script, “you can keep seeing me until your term there ends—and I’m fine with that—or you can come up with an exit strategy. You seem like a creative person. Be creative.”

Feeling the need to prove my creativity, I used the firm’s phone lines for a series of complicated long-distance calls, and wound up arranging a transfer to a government office in Iqaluit, Nunavut, in the eastern Arctic. The idea was to put as many miles as possible between myself and the sadness that had found me in Toronto, and the plan worked perfectly. The North—be it Alaska or the Northwest Territories—has a reputation as a haven for misfits, and I found this reputation to be well earned. Many of the people I met in my small Arctic town were there because they found “the south” too constricting: they were too smart for an ordinary city, or too hooked on booze, too easily bored, too restless. I liked the fact that no one questioned my description of the rough, dirt-blown place as “relaxing,” I liked it that the sun never set, and I loved the three-hour hikes I took across the tundra most evenings. I was still talking to Dr. R. every week by phone, but by the end of my fourth month in Nunavut, in the summer of 2000, I was able to sit on the deck in the clear midnight light and write one word: “Cured.”

And I meant it. Six years later, long after my clerkship was over, and after I’d emerged on the other side of a loneliness that had nearly undone me, I began to talk to publishers about the possibility of writing about my experiences. In having these discussions—which, since they saw me naming loneliness as a fundamental problem in my life, were incredibly unnerving—I expected to be met with a lot of negative reactions. I expected to be stigmatized. I expected to be judged. What I did not expect was for people to tell me I was wrong.

“Maybe you were just depressed,” I heard, time and time again, from editors and marketing reps interested in the project. Lexicographers— people who write dictionaries—often talk about the death of words, about having to delete terms and phrases that have been in use for centuries, simply because they’ve fallen out of common usage. It was with the sense of having to battle a death of meaning that I countered the assertions that I had, despite my awareness of the problem and my ability to analyze it, been suffering from the blues.

“I wasn’t depressed,” I’d reply, in an etymological spirit. “I was lonely.”

“Same thing.”

No, it’s not. In 2007, after I’d secured a contract for this book (at least one editor recognized that loneliness and depression were separate states), I created a blog called Long Term Loneliness.com. My goal was to connect with other lonely people, something that’s very hard to do in the course of ordinary life. Loneliness—especially chronic loneliness—is a state most people work incredibly hard to hide. It’s not something alluded to in even intimate conversations. I quickly discovered, however, that the Internet provided a fast and novel way of bypassing the general taboo against admitting to loneliness. My blog allowed me to post photos of myself, so that potential respondents could see me, and I used the site to write about all the things that were bothering me, such as the silence surrounding loneliness, and the idea of lonely people as unattractive. I complained—in that breezy, carefree way that’s really only possible on the Internet—about stereotypes of the lonely as socially awkward; I posted summaries of research findings; and I wrote rather urgently about the need to pull long-term loneliness into public view. I posted ads about my blog on Craigslist, and asked other lonely people to contact me if they were willing to talk. With almost no difficulty, I assembled a research pool of about twenty lonely people from across North America. All of them agreed to share their stories, provided I kept their real identities secret. (It’s for this reason that all names and identifying details of the lonely people presented in this book have been changed.)

One of the first things I mentioned in the interviews—which I conducted in 2007 and 2008—was the frustration I felt at being told that my loneliness was really depression. Rachel, a forty-two-year-old homemaker from Florida, knew immediately what I meant. “I used to think it was depression,” she says, referring to feelings of aloneness that have troubled her for years. “But I don’t think it is. I think it’s loneliness. It’s just loneliness.”

“Being lonely is somewhat sad,” says Sonia, a copywriter in her late thirties from the West Coast. She falls silent for a moment as she tries to tease loneliness and depression apart. “I might have short bouts of feeling depressed when I’m lonely,” she says, “but there’s no long-term depression where I might need medication.”

While some of the lonely people I spoke to did struggle with depression, everyone who contacted me stressed that their loneliness was a difficulty in itself. If they were depressed and lonely, they described themselves as having two problems, not one. “It’s definitely a bit of both,” says James, a Quebec-based engineer in his late fifties who suffers from both depression and loneliness. James describes the situation he faces as “chicken and egg,” with one state feeding into the other, but he stresses that loneliness is likely the core of the problem. “I ask myself if I’m depressed because I’m lonely, or if I’m lonely because I’m depressed. And I think a lot of the depression comes from being lonely.”

Loneliness is certainly not an upbeat emotion, but then, neither is grief, and we manage to see it as something other than depression. In my case, the loneliness that unfolded in my thirties was certainly marked by lows, but these lows never came to dominate the core of my emotional life. Depression, for me, has always been marked by a sort of presence, a presence that’s often evoked, by others, through the imagery of “black dogs.” Depression really does feel like something hounding and snapping at you. It’s as though you’ve been set upon by something vicious you can’t see.

With loneliness, that sense of a presence begins to vanish over time. What lonely people find themselves drowning in is absence. They have to struggle with the unnerving sense of being too much on their own, and having to rely on themselves in an effort to meet their own needs. And once the self has been searched and patted down for a sense of companionship—which is something it can’t provide—what the lonely person is left with is a worn-out, edgy sense of insufficiency. “It’s just this emptiness,” says Adam, a forty-five-year-old illustrator from Rhode Island. “I think there can be a really good emptiness, when things are really harmonious, and you’re content. But this,” he says, referring to days and nights spent entirely alone, “this is shameful. It makes me want to not do anything.”

I’m not suggesting that loneliness is full of joy, or that it doesn’t bear a passing resemblance to depression. What I am saying is that we need to start seeing loneliness as something separate from the noonday demon. The social psychologists and neuroscientists who work with the lonely are careful to stress that they know what they’re doing. They’re not, with all of their advanced degrees and methodological training, accidentally mixing up depression with loneliness, and foolishly confusing one state with the other.

“I’m quite careful about what it is that we’re studying,” says Dr. John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago neuroscientist who is one of the world’s leading loneliness researchers. I’d called him, very nervously, in the fall of 2007, after reading close to a dozen of his papers. Getting him on the phone was, from a loneliness perspective, sort of like calling God, and I’d made myself memorize my list of questions before dialing his number. One of the first things I asked about was the notion of loneliness as a problem in its own right, and it was a balm to hear him confirm what I’d long suspected.

“Loneliness is related to depression, but it’s not the same thing,” he stresses. “If you see loneliness as just an aspect of depression—and that’s really how it’s been conceived—then it doesn’t require any special attention.”

What Cacioppo and his fellow researchers are stressing is that loneliness does require special attention. Using statistical analyses, specialized scales, physiological assessments, and careful interviews, Cacioppo and others working in the field have demonstrated that loneliness—in itself—can lead to dementia, early death, physical illness, and behavioral changes. “We are fundamentally a social species,” says Cacioppo. “If you take other people away, we don’t do well.”

Conversations with lonely people tend to reveal difficulties that can’t be reduced to depression—such as a persistent sense of isolation, a troubling lack of intimacy, and an unwelcome jealousy that erupts when confronted with other people’s rich social ties. Many lonely people refer to depression as not just a different state but a state capable of pushing loneliness to the margins. “I was crying, I was sad, I was having these crazy thoughts,” says Rachel, referring to a depression that overcame her after the birth of her second child. That depression, she says, was terrible, “but it blocked out the loneliness, because it was quite a different feeling. It was when the depression lifted that I began to feel lonely again.”

One reason we’re comfortable saying that loneliness is “just depression” is that we don’t have enough information about the state. Loneliness isn’t widely written about, and findings about loneliness don’t make the evening news. In this sense, the lack of awareness about loneliness is understandable; if it constituted the extent of the problem, it could be excused. But there’s something else in play as well—a sluggishness, a failure of the imagination. Studies suggest that close to 10 percent of North Americans struggle with persistent loneliness, but we don’t want to think of what life is like for these millions of people. We don’t want to imagine what it’s like to feel lonely day after day and month after month. We don’t want to dwell on the circumstances of a life marked by strong feelings of isolation, and by long stretches of aloneness. Telling ourselves that loneliness is just depression is a way of closing the door on the state. It means we don’t have to hear from the lonely, we don’t have to understand what their lives are like. We can say, “You were just depressed,” and in this way completely shut out what the lonely might be trying to say.

It took me some time, after my return to Toronto in August 2000, to notice things going awry. After my clerkship, I had to prepare for my bar admission exams, which involved a class every morning and an exam every two weeks for a period of four months. In fairy tales, major life changes are often preceded with long, deep sleeps—think “Sleeping Beauty”—and the strangest thing about my bar admission course was how often it saw me napping. After class, I’d study from about one o’clock to three o’clock, then collapse onto the bed with the windows wide open and fall into a thick, gluttonous sleep. I’d wake at six or seven, cold and confused about the day and about whether I’d missed class.

Even at the time, I felt as though the sleeps had some significance, but I couldn’t discern just what it was they were trying to warn me about. In any event, the naps were interrupted by my return to work. I’d decided, during my bright nighttime hikes across the tundra, that I had to dedicate myself to something meaningful, and after my bar exams were over, I chose to become an environmental protection lawyer. I went to a small boutique firm that offered me the sort of light, flexible schedule my psychiatrist had encouraged me toward, and bought a tight tweed jacket, which I thought of as my “environmental law coat.” I spent my early weeks at the firm arranging plants, gathering binders, and ordering books on deforestation. I noticed that the office was often fairly empty. My bosses spread themselves thin and kept strange hours, and an environmental practice meant attending to landscapes hours away, with official contacts being little more than voices on the phone, and the real clients being trees. There were law clerks in the back office—cheerful young women who did excellent work while keeping up an unbroken dialogue about mortgages, therapists, and vacations—but the front office, where I sat, was often still. We were in a converted loft space with massive skylights, and I began to feel as though there wasn’t enough physically present for the light to hit on. Mine would be the only office occupied, and I could wander from doorway to doorway in my stocking feet, encountering no one.

The fact that I’d chosen a highly specialized field meant I began to lose touch with classmates who’d stayed at the big litigation firms, and—just as my professional life was contracting—my personal life began to winnow itself down as well. One day in October 2001, my father went to the emergency ward with an inexplicable 104-degree fever. By December he was dead, consumed from within by a sharklike cancer that had encircled him without warning. My reaction, as my father’s body began to shrink and he lost the ability to grip the books he’d always loved, was, Here we go again. His death, in many ways, felt like a repetition of the loss I’d experienced in childhood, when I must have watched him move out, never to return. And the uncanny thing about this second departure was that it signaled a recurrence of the isolation I’d struggled with in childhood. After his death, I quickly learned the details of his will—my sisters and I had inherited nothing, while my stepmother inherited everything—and this left me furious with Mary-Ann, who I’d previously felt quite fondly toward. I felt cut off from my sisters, who were engrossed in the issue of how to handle their children’s grief, and I was struck, just as I had been in childhood, by my mother’s interminable aloneness. Given the acrimonious nature of the divorce, she hadn’t been given any role at the funeral, and I sat and watched numbly from the back of a limousine as she stood outside the funeral home and tried to find a ride to the cemetery.

I was thirty-one when my father died. This meant, of course, that I had resources at my disposal that I hadn’t had as a child.

“You have amazing friends,” said Juliette, a confidante from college, shortly after my father’s death. Not only had Juliette, Laura, and other friends supported me during my father’s hospitalization, they had—while I was dealing with funeral arrangements and trying to absorb the worst of the shock—painted my entire apartment. I’d signed a lease two months before my father died, and they hadn’t wanted to see me coming back to a place that was dingy and chipped.

“I know,” I replied, looking at my cream and sage walls. In the weeks following my father’s death, I often thought of my friends standing together in the snowy graveyard as my father was being buried, and this memory was surprisingly comforting—it was a way of reminding myself that I wasn’t as alone as I had been in childhood.

And that sense of reassurance might have been enough. I might, with friends in place and a career beginning to unfold, have sidestepped loneliness. I was single at the time, but I don’t think that a life filled with only work and friends is necessarily a lonely one. The problem was that, almost without me realizing it, a gap had opened up. The Canadian poet Michael Redhill talks about loneliness “metastasizing,” and the one person who had kept my sense of isolation from dividing and subdividing had been my father. Even though he’d been absent for much of my childhood, when I looked at him, I’d seen myself. There was something about his quietness and reserve that mirrored my own; there was a steady, unwavering gentleness to him that made me feel safe. I’d started seeing a new therapist, a deftly intelligent Jungian analyst named Genevieve, when my dad entered hospital, and I told her about the dreams I’d been having about his impending death. I’d be snapping pictures of him, and he’d be disappearing from frame to frame, or aliens would be leading him up a path of light to a spaceship.

At the time, even though my father was very sick, the doctors kept telling us that he’d pull through, and both of my sisters seemed to believe this. After my dad died, I asked Genevieve why I’d been the only one who seemed to think that his death had been a certainty.

“It’s possible that you were attuned to your father in a way that others weren’t,” she replied.

I asked her what attunement meant, and she told me that it meant silent connection, a wordless sense of identification. I made a mental note of the term—it seemed slightly academic at the time—but I think that was what I found myself increasingly missing as the months wore on. The sense I’d had of matching with at least one other person had disappeared, and—as this feeling evaporated, and perhaps because it had evaporated—my relationships with others began to winnow out and thin. In 2002, in the months following my father’s death, my close friend Simon and his wife realized they were expecting another child, and this discovery pulled them closer into a home-based world that had less room for me. Laura began an internship with a women’s law organization in Nairobi; Juliette became heavily involved with her job at a film company; and Georgina, a softspoken friend from law school, left for another town. I began an affair with a tall, dark-haired professor, but the substitution function Ron was serving—he was so clever and bookish, so coincidentally like my dad—became so obvious and disturbing that I ended the relationship before it had the chance to bloom.

My office was near King Street West, the core of Toronto’s financial hub. A few blocks away from my office were the huge sixty- and seventy-story towers that housed tens of thousands of employees. I used to love the morning rush. I liked the sight of everyone hurrying from the subways, briefcases in hand, coffee mugs at the ready, newspapers folded under elbows. One of the things I liked to do in the evenings was watch the reverse of this process. If mornings were marked by a slightly regimented aspect, with everyone arriving at the same time and looking slightly pressured, evenings were a more casual affair, with people chatting as they waited for the streetcar, or talking on their cell phones as they wandered toward the subway entrance, or idly counting out bills as they drew money from the bank machines.

One warm night in early fall, about nine months after my father had died, I was engaged in what I called my Friday-evening dawdling. I went to a bookstore and bought Life of Pi, then wandered back out to King Street to have a mint tea at Starbucks. With my tea finished, I went into a cheap clothing store and browsed through the flashy, flimsy acrylic sweaters on sale. They weren’t my style—I liked wool and heavy knits—and I realized, upon leaving the store, that I had nothing else to do.

The subway entrances in downtown Toronto are bordered by thick silver rails: the steps descend from one direction, and opposite the steps is a concrete barrier with the rail on top. The rail is positioned at chest height, so that you can lean on it and watch people as they enter the station. What I found myself doing, after I left the sweater shop, was standing at the railing to King Station and looking down. Although I didn’t know any of the people I was seeing, I felt I had some sense of how their evenings were going to unfold. The leisurely pace, and the look of relaxation on many faces, spoke of home lives, of boarding a northbound or southbound train to meet a wife, or boyfriend, or best friend.

And I suddenly realized that my life was no longer like that—that I had no one to visit, no one to return home to. I juggled the weight of my paperback in its plastic bag, and began to feel slightly anxious. My after-work loitering suddenly assumed a different hue. I hadn’t been dawdling, I realized. I’d been avoiding something. And what I’d been trying to put off was my inevitable return to an empty apartment, and to a weekend that offered little or nothing in the way of company.

It was one of those perfect, windless, cloudless evenings, with the sky a rich indigo that made the streetlights seem incandescent. There was something about the beauty of the evening, the Indian summer feel to it, that made my loneliness seem suddenly stark. It was as though the world was full of riches that had escaped me. The strategies I’d been deploying against feelings of aloneness—reading, window-shopping, wandering—suddenly struck me as childish, as forms of evasion that were bound to fail. Although I’d later come to associate loneliness with weight, I felt, as I stood at the rail, suddenly too light and unfixed, as though there literally weren’t enough to me to keep me grounded.

There was a tide of people heading down the steps, and I began to feel as though it were pulling me toward it. I tried to think about diversions, but came up empty-handed. The financial district would shut down in another hour or two, leaving me with nothing but smoke shops and courier depots. I could head to one of the movie theaters or malls farther north, but doing so would only buy me some time. What I couldn’t avoid, and what I could feel myself stiffen against as I lifted my arms off the rail, was an evening of aloneness. I soon found myself joining others in the march down the station staircase, and heard a train rumbling along the northbound track. The train pushed warm, humid air from the tunnel into the station as it came to a stop and opened its doors. Without being quite aware of what I was doing, I boarded the train, and as the doors closed, I began to feel as though the stranger I’d been aware of all my life—the one who’d been waiting to make my acquaintance—had found me and was pressed up against me, ready to follow me home.