Everybody: A Book about Freedom by Olivia Laing

Everybody: A Book about Freedom Reviews

• 
  julieta

  Olivia Laing is becoming one of my favorite essaysts! I have to say this before I write anything about this book, since the pleasure of reading this engaging and wonderful book is the first thing to mention. To speak about bodies and freedom, she speaks of, activism, racism, imprisionment, violence, misoginy, feminisim. Wilhelm Reich, Kate Bush, Martin Luther King, Ana Mendieta, Marquis de Sade, Susan Sontag, Nina Simone, Agnes Martin, Malcolm X, Elias Canetti and many more are here, and she connects them in surprising ways that open up the world and its many messages, the possibility that out bodies are a way to resist what is wrong in this world, and to truly make a difference. These are not separate essays, the whole book is connected, just like this world we live in, and just like all of us who inhabit it are.
• 
  Diane S ☔

  Laing is such a fabulous writer, not only are these essays interesting but they also teach, empathize and she always leave some wanting more. In these she uses Wilhelm Reich to tie these essays together or maybe I should say she uses him to guide us through what freedom for our body actually means.
  
  From Isherwood and Weimar Berlin she explores the sexual freedom that was prominent, where all sexes, what one was or wanted to be was not judged. From freedom to McCarthyism which was almost the opposite. From illness, using Sontag and her will not to submit to the cancer eating away at her body, to Agnes Martin, who wanted to escape from people and her mental illness. Malcolm X and Nina Simone, all the different freedoms they wanted but did not have, though they fought for them.
  
  There is so much here, people who found freedom, people who want to take away others freedoms, these essays exemplify both the body's power and it's vulnerability. A truly terrific grouping of essays.
  
  ARC from W. W. Norton and Edelweiss.
• 
  Nada Elshabrawy

  A book that raised a billion questions in my head, while curating me an entire reading list to look for answers within.
  Ps. Extremely re-readable.
  
  
  Book review on youtube. ريفيو مصور عن الكتاب على #دودة_كتب
  
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkLsg...
• 
  Thomas

  I appreciated how Olivia Laing frames the body as a source of activism and political resistance in her book Everybody. She writes with intelligence and controlled passion about how forces such as sexism, racism, and homophobia affect our bodies on both an internal and external level. Despite these strengths, I found this book lacking in focus and therefore I felt myself distanced from it on an emotional level. Laing’s subjects span key figures in psychoanalysis such as Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, civil rights activists including Nina Simone and Malcolm X, as well as today’s environmental protestors, though the connections between all these groups felt tenuous aside from the broader political themes that affected their lives. I felt a bit more compelled by Laing’s nuggets of self-disclosure throughout the book, and I wondered whether including more of herself would have helped me connect with the book more. Though I recognize that Laing may not have wanted to center herself in Everybody and that other readers may have considered that too self-involved.
• 
  Vartika

  I met Olivia Laing at a talk she delivered yesterday to celebrate the paperback release of Everybody, where she revisited her writing in light of the manifold developments across the world affecting our rights—freedoms—to inhabit our bodies as we wish. She later obliged to sign my (rather battered) copy of the book, and after a brief, warm conversation, added two little hearts around her signature. This simple interaction evoked something bodily in me, something that felt quite like the "streaming" that she starts this book talking about.

  
  [Untitled (1976), from Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta's Silueta series of photographs, installations and films]

  What is a body? According to Laing, it is a source of power, a store of vulnerability, and the vehicle through which all our experiences of the world are shaped—it is the one resource we all have in common as well as the very same that sets each of us apart. The textures of our lives are impacted deeply by the kind of bodies we inhabit, and in the eight chapters that make up this book, Laing blends memoir, art criticism, and biography in her usual fashion to explore the various ways in which our bodies, these “permeable vessels”, resist and coexist with the various forces that attempt to manage and discipline them into myriad unfreedoms.
  
  Freedom, according to her, is the ultimate object of the body, and not simply a matter of indulging material cravings, but also “finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyed by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which you’ve been assigned.” Everybody thus looks at all attempts to embody freedom, as inherently political—just like physicality itself.
  
  This is a belief the author shares with Wilhelm Reich: Viennese psychoanalyst, member of Freud’s inner circle, anti-fascist, and over-all one of 20th century’s most controversial figures in science—certainly the only one whose works were burnt by both the Nazis and the US government. In fact, Laing employs Reich’s life and beliefs—particularly his focus on recognising systemic barriers rather than just individual neuroses as causes of psychological disturbance (a major departure from Freud)—as a sort of structural link connecting the many threads that run through this book. She does not always agree with him or condone the idiosyncrasies of his later career—rather, she attempts to examine how these came about and thereby vindicate the valuable observations at the heart of his most radical early theses.

  
  [Still from the music video for Kate Bush's 1981 song
  Cloudbusting, which was inspired by Wilhelm Reich's son Peter's memoir of their life together]

  At the center of Laing’s own argument is the idea of the body as a fluid, ever-becoming thing, and her exploration of the limits placed on it is carried out through a sort of conversation she creates between her sources, herself, and her readers. Here, Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker and Audre Lorde explicate illness; Christopher Isherwood and Magnus Hirshfeld expose us to sexual freedoms in the Weimar Republic and through it, ideas on sexuality, “deviance,” and queerness; Andrea Dworkin and Angela Carter consider the links between misogyny and sadism (from Marquis de Sade) and Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta explores sexual violence in the contemporary age.
  
  Moving along, we look at the idea of outlawed bodies: through Agnes Martin, whose life and work was centered on evading the “cage world” of both gender and institutionalisation; through James Vivian Bond, a trans performer who acted as Laing’s introduction to a world beyond compulsory heterosexism; through Stonewall, eugenics, and the (quite damning) links between Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and Fascism. Malcolm X, Edith Jacobson and Bayard Rustin (along with figures like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.) walk us through the turbulent history of imprisonment, retributive incarceration as an extension of slavery, and the way deviance from sexual and familial norms were—and are—used to attack and discredit the fight against systemic racist oppression. Lastly, Philip Guston helps us explore the mentality of the mob, while Nina Simone examines violence, non-violence and an uncertain future.

  [Photograph of Bayard Rustin (L), an unsung hero of the Civil Rights movement, and author James Baldwin (R), c. 1963]

  Laing in Everybody is committed to fluidity, and the conversation shifts back and forth, one realises that behind this ambitious project are the author’s attempts to make us think beyond the binaries that are routinely and systematically forced upon our bodies—those between health and illness, male and female, liberty and confinement, “normal” and “deviant”, life and death. Indeed, it is only when one begins to look beyond these strictures can we understand freedom, what it requires and what it means: as the title of the book tells us, freedom is for “everybody” – for “everyone”, as well as for “all bodies”, whatever kind they may be.
  
  However, one of my two criticisms of this book is, curiously enough, in this very regard: for all her stresses on “every body,” Laing fails to really include those of the disabled. The other concerns the way England and the United States sometimes collapse in her work, to the latter's visibility and the former's (dis)advantage: the second half of Everybody recounts a pulsing and powerful history of racism and the struggle for Civil Rights in the US context, bringing to light figures and incidents which have hitherto been and are even today being summarily and deliberately excluded from popular memory. However, in what seems to me a rather ironic oversight, nothing whatsoever is said of the rampant anti-blackness that was pervasive in and being fought against in the UK in this same period. A stark omission indeed, given how these sections were aimed, in part, at linking these historical struggles for justice with the global Black Lives Matter movement.
  
  Even so, it is a truly radical project the author here takes on, and I found some wisdom in the fact that room is provided for readers to contemplate it towards the very end. I similarly admired her commitment to nuance, to blowing holes in the concept of purity now too establishing itself on the political left, and to showing in an era of increasing absolutism how (and, crucially, why) people who truly understand the damages of violence—as Reich did—can be driven to repeat it.
  
  Certainly, one of the most admirable accomplishments in this book is its echoing of Angela Davis in ascertaining that freedom as an ongoing, constant struggle. While we are made to revisit the important corridors of (US) history, it is accompanied by consistent reminders of historical continuities and the conditions of our own time (the pandemic, the rise of the ultra-right on a global scale, and capitalist destruction, to name a few), so that it is well driven home that

  “Freedom is a shared endeavour, a collaboration built by many hands over many centuries of time, a labour which every single person living can choose to hinder or advance. It is possible to remake the world. What you cannot do is assume that any change is permanent. Everything can be undone, and every victory must be refought.”
• 
  Paul Ataua

  I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring
  – David Bowie.
  
  I am always reminded of the Bowie quote whenever I start reading anything by Olivia Laing. She starts in one place and time and then takes you on a journey that you could never have imagined. You don’t quite know know where you are going next , but you know wherever it is, it won’t be boring. Setting a course through the struggle for bodily freedom, she begins with Freud and Wilhelm Reich (the person that ties all the parts together) and takes you through sexually liberated Berlin of the twenties with Auden and Isherwood, the Fascism of the thirties, the woman’s movement with Ana Mendieta, Angela Dworkin, and Angela Carter, the civil rights movement, and the counter culture with Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac. She even manages to include a bit of Kate Bush and also some anti Margaret Thatcher chants. You can’t help but be fascinated, stimulated by the loose connections that draw all of this together. This is a book that will definitely make you want to curl up in your orgone accumulator.
  
  
• 
  fatma

  I'm not sure why this book didn't work for me like The Lonely City did. From what I'd read of its synopsis, Everybody seemed like it was poised to be a new favourite--a series of essays exploring the body and its relation to politics and liberation? Yes please. It sounded so good, and it's not that it was bad, exactly, it just didn't leave any kind of impression on me. I think this is partly because I didn't care all that much about the principal figure of this book, Wilhelm Reich. Laing explores so many people's lives in Everybody--Susan Sontag, Nina Simone, Malcolm X, Andrea Dworkin--but her focus always goes back to Reich, and I just wasn't all that drawn to him as a subject of analysis.
  
  Another thing is that these essays felt a little scattered in their focus. The Lonely City worked so well for me because each of its chapters was dedicated to a historical figure, and as such devoted the time to properly exploring that figure's life. That's not to say that Everybody needed to be written like The Lonely City, but just that the latter's format worked so much better than the former's. The essays in Everybody often flitted from one figure to another, trying to ground them all under the same set of themes. But though I appreciated Laing's attempts to draw on the commonalities between these figures, I would've liked more on fewer figures rather than a little on many figures.
  
  Thanks so much to W.W. Norton & Company for providing me with an e-ARC of this in exchange for an honest review!
• 
  Ari Levine

  The self-indulgence and indiscipline are strong here... Crudo was not an isolated event.
• 
  Sarah Schulman

  Everybody is a riveting and fascinating innovative historiography of 20th century Euro-American radical thought. Olivia Laing's eagle eye connects previously dispersed impulses to understand and express with her lucid writing, revealing mostly Jewish, Female, and Black desires for radical social transformation through sexuality, liberation and the body. Brainy, open-hearted and bold.
• 
  Andrea McDowell

  I love Olivia Laing, with one qualification, and I loved this book, with the same (those of you who follow my reviews probably already know where this is going).
  
  Laing's research into the figures she covers, including psychologists, writers and artists, and her close reading and interpretation of their works, and how she links them together, are stunning and beautiful. Her thesis is liberating and a joy to investigate with her (that people's bodies are the site of both their vulnerability and their power, in the quest for freedom and vulnerability). She writes about the subjugation experienced by racialized, queer, trans, female and feminine bodies, various kinds of incarceration and their effects, and the use of those bodies to find and enjoy freedom.
  
  However, in all of this, she nearly entirely ignores disability. There are a few offhand mentions here or there to the fact that disability is also a site of oppression, and that's it. In the meantime, disabled people and disability in general have often been incarcerated, institutionalized, sterilized, euthanized, controlled, and deprived of access and equal rights to this day, on the basis of their bodies. Illness enters the book often, but not disability.
  
  I'm not the only reader/reviewer to notice this omission (see:
  https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/992049...).
  
  Highly recommended, but with notable oversights.
• 
  Reece Carter

  I honestly cannot say enough good things about this book.
  
  Everybody takes a Foucaultian look at arenas of major sociopolitical action over the last century, always circling back to the central role that bodies play in these discussions. Laing focuses on many figures -- Wilhelm Reich, Susan Sontag, Bayard Rustin, and Nina Simone to name a few -- and the use of their bodies in shaping modern dialogue on topics such as race and sexuality.
  
  I've gone back and forth on my use of the word "body" in political discourse. When I heard/saw it on social media ("violence on black bodies" or "silencing of queer bodies"), my first instinct was always to roll my eyes. There was something about the use of such a concrete image like the body in a discussion about massive institutional and systemic problems that seemed too theoretical and academic for TikTok. However, I think Laing's book changed my perspective on the use of the word "body"; it's probably the best image to use given that it's the vehicle through which we interact with the world, both by giving and receiving.
  
  One of Laing's analyses that really interested me was the role of the body in medicine. Laing takes up chronicles of illness from writers like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde to examine what it means to experience medicine as a body. Undoubtedly, we can see that symptoms of sickness are like a language of the body that is otherwise quiet. It's interesting that we really only seem to notice this language when it's saying that something is wrong; we take positive news for granted. On this note, Laing also notes how a popular idea in some circles was that there was a concrete link between the psyche and physical illness. Psychoanalyst Wilhem Reich believed that past trauma was stored in the body and that this could in turn cause illness. While this is an interesting idea, albeit with some kooky corollaries, another thing that fascinated me was Laing's discussion of how patient's feel when they become sick. They are confronted with the confines of their own body, often reduced to raw flesh in a hospital gown. Indeed, the gown itself is one step of a depersonalizing process that begins the second one steps into a hospital whereby doctors strip patients of their selves in order to better isolate the sickness. Illness also accentuates how the body can be a "permeable vessel" that is subject to forces outside its control. This move can be made to discuss tangible things like viruses or intangible things like generational poverty. I think further efforts in what I'm going to call "body analysis" or "theory of body" would be incredibly insightful for really disparate fields like medicine and politics.
  
  However, Laing relates this neat analysis of ~bodies~ to the political realm by making the simple observations that not all bodies are treated equal. If bodies are the "permeable vessels" that Laing claims (one side of a two-sided theory by Reich), then they are not all exposed to the same external forces. Black bodies experience different forces than white bodies. Queer bodies experience different forces than het bodies. And it's this difference that Laing charts in her book in a way that is both witty and informative.
  
  One aspect of this text that particularly impressed me was the wide variety of sources used to explore the definition of bodies and their relationships to one another. I found myself reading an analysis of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom while only a few pages later examining performance art. I think this book exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary study in that it provides us a multi-angle view of a single question. Laing seamlessly moves from art theory to music analysis to literary critique, all while managing to avoid pretentiousness. At times, it felt like I was talking to a very educated, philosophically minded friend. Witty and biting, Laing's voice is incredibly unique and experiencing it is reason enough to read this text. Additionally, while this book is rooted in theory, Laing still manages to espouse praxis as being the ultimate goal. You know that Laing is not sitting in an ivory tower, chewing mental bubblegum for the hell of it. Laing is about action as their own history in activism proves.
  
  Overall, I cannot recommend this book enough. I will say that some chapters may be challenging without some familiarity with psychoanalysis or the discussed texts (i.e. Sade) but there were plenty of works I was not familiar with and managed to appreciate the analysis nonetheless.
• 
  Tommy Lefroy

  I found Olivia Laing’s Everybody to be astute, conversational and wildly interesting. Laing’s discussion on “bodily freedom”, though fairly western / euro centric, still manages to uncover some overlooked figures in the fight against civil and sexual repression, and physical health freedoms. Published in early 2021, this is a timely read, though there is only brief mention of current events.
  'Everybody' is dense and can jump subjects quickly. I had to read it in spurts because I've spent much of the last year living out of an overstuffed suitcase that this book was too big to fit in :') But this was one of those reads that felt like a fateful find because an uncanny number of topics it addressed had recently come up in conversations around me—everything from welfare eugenics in first wave feminism to Marquis de Sade to Todd Haynes’s 1995 film Safe (which an ex once described in great detail how it was shot as we drove through the valley, near LA, where it was filmed).
  
  One recurring subject, Wilhelm Reich, is presented by Laing with such compassion, the closeness she clearly feels to Reich’s fascinating story makes the reader feel the same. After dedicating his life to the pursuit of freedom, Austrian-born Reich died in the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Laing’s take on bodily freedom can come across easily as a lack thereof. Although there is rhetoric such as, ‘the fight’s not over yet’ etc, Laing’s choice to make Reich a focal point reinforces themes of disillusionment, present in so many movements towards freedom, which left me with an aftertaste of hopelessness, reader beware.
  
  One fun fact I gleaned was that Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting is straight up about the FBI raiding Reich’s orgone generator factory (we love a marginal history reference!)
  I also particularly liked Laing’s discussion on the works (and mysterious death) of feminist artist Ana Mendieta, civil and gay rights activist Bayard Rustin, and Nina Simone. I found the section on Simone to be particularly poignant as a performer, including the below excerpt which was one of my favorites -
  
  " ‘Everybody is half dead,’ she told an interviewer in 1969, setting out once again what sounds very much like a Reichian philosophy. ‘Everybody avoids everybody. All over the place, in most situations, most all of the time. I know. I’m one of those everybodies, and to me it is terrible. And so all I’m trying to do all the time is just open people up so they can feel themselves and let themselves be open to somebody else. That is all. That’s it.’ "
  
  ^this stirs so much in me and reminds me I can’t. wait. to play shows this summer 🖤
  
  -Wynter
  
  More on Riech, by Laing -
  
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
  
  More on Todd Haynes's Safe -
  
  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...
  
  More on Ana Mendieta -
  
  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddes...
  
  Kate Bush's Cloudbusting -
  
  https://open.spotify.com/track/5atQ2h...
• 
  Rebecca

  Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring and outsider artists for the highly atmospheric
  The Lonely City. Her new book is similarly wide-ranging in its points of reference and again brings together biography, theory and memoir. The topic here is slightly more nebulous, however. It’s about being a body in the modern world and how outside forces like illness, rape and imprisonment restrict physical freedom. The gurus this time include an analyst in 1920s Vienna, the feminist writers and civil rights activists of the 1960s–70s, and today’s environmental protestors. I found Everybody scattered and sometimes struggled to find an overall thread, but it contains many interesting nuggets of information and fascinating life stories that are worth engaging with.
  
  See my full review at
  Shiny New Books.
• 
  Anna Baillie-Karas

  I love Olivia Laing’s writing and this is another invigorating non-fiction work. She creates mini-biographies of artists and thinkers from history (Reich, Sontag) but they become interesting stories through her lucidity & feminist eyes. She uses the idea of the body to explore human experience, thought and struggles with freedom & illness, with intimate portraits of her characters along the way. Will be more rewarding if you know the people featured.
• 
  Ashley Marilynne Wong

  Ahh… It’s books like this that make narrative non-fiction incredibly addictive.
• 
  Alessia Scurati

  Sarò breve:
  STUPENDO.
  Basta.
  Ho sempre detto che i libri primariamente si dividono in libri che vale la pena leggere e libri che è meglio di no.
  Questo non solo appartiene al primo gruppo. Ma è un libro che apre porte. Apre mondi.
  E due mesi fa ho detto a una persona che Nina Simone per me aveva il duende secondo Lorca. Io ero ignorante circa la musica di Nina Simone. La mia affermazione è stata considerata molto azzardata. Quindi se leggete questo libro e arrivate all’ultimo capitolo… Vedi che non sono solo io?!?!?!?
• 
  Mir

  VIDEORECENSIONE
  https://youtu.be/OaU2AKV_2yU
• 
  Delia Rainey

  olivia laing is a connector of thinkers. i loved coming back to this book because every time i read a chapter, i learned so much, like a good documentary ~ aside from cultural critique and comparison and laing's own thoughts and life, a huge chunk of this reading experience was learning about the histories of others in long, detailed explanations of their lives and their work: ana mendieta, susan sontag, nina simone, kathy acker, andrea dworkin, marquis de sade, angela carter, agnes martin, bayard rustin, malcolm x, philip guston, freud ~ all in conversation with the orgasm-box jewish german psychoanalyst, wilheim reich. laing's writing somehow connects all these bodies together, a conversation on the desire to understand human nature more than anything: "say you wanted a better world." discussing the reich idea of orgasms leading to a better world, laing unpacks the broader idea of processing and acknowledging our private lives ("the weight of history abides in our private bodies") to bring about change. this point is powerful, and laing cites it straight from james baldwin, as many of the ideas in the book are not their own: "I have always been stuck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless..." none of this highly researched work is at all pretentious or self-serving. even as laing described their own identity and experiences, it was always brief, self-aware, and added to the complexity of the portraits ~ like describing seeing andrea dworkin speak at a feminist conference as a younger person, and feeling deep sexual shame. I admire laing so much as a nonfiction writer because they write essays that could be defined as "academic" or "philosophical", yet the writing is accessible and readable. I could easily digest every dutifully described phrasing. ~ and wouldn't it be fucked-up if a book about bodily freedom was filled with academic/theory jargon, only understood by a small group of people?
• 
  Jaclyn

  The sheer scope of this project! The depth of Laing’s intellect! The ambition! History, politics, philosophy with the lightest touch of memoir! I don’t want to reduce Laing’s achievement here to a summary so all I will say is that if you read narrative non-fiction, and even if you don’t, hers is one of the brightest minds in this space. Oh and she’s one of the most beautiful writers. That combination has me completely floored. This is Laing’s finest work to date and it simply has to be read.
• 
  Maite Van Den Borre

  Aanrader voor iedereen met interesse in de geschiedenis/materialisatie/commercialisering van zowel "het lichaam" als "gender"
• 
  Brynn

  "The inner world, she thought, was far more fluid and changeable than the body in which it's housed. She tried to invent a better design: perhaps a body made of gas or cloud, so that it could expand, contract, maybe break apart, fuse, swell, get thicker or thinner according to a person's shifting moods." (36)
  
  "'The number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties is almost unending,' he wrote that year, sounding very much like Virginia Woolf in her gender-swapping, time-traveling masterpiece Orlando. 'In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics exactly match in kind and number.'" (79)
  
  "As Chris Kraus says in I Love Dick: 'Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?'" (150)
  
  "To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously political. We're all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they're capable of and what they're allowed or forbidden to do." (179)
  
  "The biggest mistake he made was to think you can isolate yourself from the outside world. You can't. Our past stays with us, embedded in our bodies, and we live whether we like it or not in the object world, sharing the resources of reality with billions of other beings. There is no steel-lined box that can protect you from the grid of forces that limits in tangible, tormenting ways what each private body is allowed to be or do. There is no escape, no possible place to hide. Either you submit to the world or you change the world." (193)
  
  "I find it hard to watch footage of protests from the 1990s, especially of the evictions at Newbury, because it feels as if I'm looking directly into a moment when the future could still have gone a different way, a microcosmic, speeded-up version of what is happening now to the planet as a whole." (251)
  
  "There is no republic of unencumbered bodies, free to migrate between states, unharried by any hierarchy of form. It's impossible to know if it will ever be achieved, but if I'm certain about anything at all, it's that freedom is a shared endeavor, a collaboration built by many hands over many centuries of time, a labour which every single living person can choose to hinder or advance. It is possible to remake the world. What you cannot do is assume that any change is permanent. Everything can be undone, and every victory must be refought." (308)
  
  "
• 
  Charlotte

  I love how this book makes me think about so many different topics and helps me remember so many things I've seen or read or heard about before, while at the same time suggesting so much more to read and see and listen to. Love how it meanders and connects those topics and people and academics and artworks in such readable and often insightful ways. Also applaud the energy, the plea for the necessity of at least trying to do some world-changing throughout the book. Ending with Nina Simone and the 22nd century is beautiful.
  
  What I don't like is harder to formulate. An example is the - what seems to me unfair - discussion of Sontag, with a focus not at all on her published work but purely on her diary entries and choice of treatment plan in a sort of strangely constructed opposition to Acker? Laing seems strangely coarse in dealing with Sontag? Help me out if you have thoughts on this. More overall, I'm perhaps sometimes a little bit frustrated that there are what seem to me as so many interesting starts of arguments, that are then never quite further developed or integrated and that just leave you (or me) wanting more.
• 
  Cheryl

  I've loved everything I've read by Olivia Laing. The way she can draw connections between artist and thinkers across genres and eras is dazzling. "Everybody" is an insightful and lucid examination of the way bodies carry political and cultural meanings, and how those meanings differ depending on the body you're in. Using Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich as a jumping off point, Laing makes her way through the 20th century, from Weimar Berlin to the civil rights and gay liberation movements in the US and Britain, to the feminist body artists of the 1970s America (Ana Mendieta and the University of Iowa are featured). She then moves to the present, from the struggles for trans rights to the resurgence of white supremacy under Trump, and the current issues around bodily autonomy during a global pandemic. I had a visceral reaction to some of Laing's writing, which is only appropriate for a book about bodies.
• 
  Conor Mulcahy

  Everybody is a beautifully strange and emotive examination of the human body through the lenses of sexuality, gender, violence and various civil rights movements throughout history.
  
  Laing masterfully weaves her own experiences with character studies of everybody (pun not intended) from Susan Sontag to Nina Simone, with the whole thing threaded together by an in-depth exploration of the life and work of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a protégé of Sigmund Freud and the subject of Kate Bush's 'Cloudbusting'.
  
  The more that I read, the more I was engrossed in Laing's examination of bodily freedom and the many ways it has been encroached upon throughout the last century, and I found myself genuinely moved on several occasions.
• 
  Emily

  Olivia Laing is an amazing writer. She crafts beautiful sentences, but what's so great about her books is that they inevitably lead me to other artists and writers, to people I've never heard of and people I've never looked at closely before. In this book, Bayard Rustin, a civil rights pioneer I was unfamiliar with, is the former and the musician Nina Simone is the latter. Olivia Laing's writing makes me want to learn more, and that is a valuable thing.
• 
  Bonnie Wroe

  Reading Olivia Laing is luxurious. Eloquent without being pretentious, educational but in an incredibly readable, storytelling way. I really savoured this one to make it last as long as poss.
• 
  Tuomas Aitonurmi

  Hankin tämän kirjan Edinburghin Waterstonesilta. Huomioni kiinnittyi kirjailijan nimeen (hänen teoksensa The Lonely City tuli joitain vuosia sitten toistuvasti vastaan) ja teoksen nimen ja kannen yhdistelmään. Kansikuva on hienovaraisella tavalla gay. Koska queer-teemat kiinnostavat aina ja ruumiillisuus erityisesti juuri nyt, takakannen kuvaustekstikin puhutteli, ja heräteostin kirjan.
  
  Teos sisältää parhaalle esseistiikalle ominaisesti ajattelua, joka vavahduttaa ja paljastaa maailmasta uusia puolia. Niteen väliin kertyi 15 merkintälappua osoittamaan olennaisia kohtia – se on minulle harvinaisen paljon. Laing kuljettaa punaisena lankana psykoanalyytikko Wilhelm Reichin ajatuksia ja elämäntarinaa. Runsas biografisen aineiston käyttö onkin se, joka erottaa Laingin monista muista esseisteistä (esim. itsestäni), mutta hän sulauttaa informaation kauniisti omaan kerrontaansa ja anekdootit ovat tehokkaita. Reich oli ristiriitainen hahmo ja hänen elämässään oli paljon ongelmallista, mutta jotkut hänen ajatuksistaan resonoivat Laingissa paljon käsitellessään ruumiillista vapautta.
  
  Minulle pysäyttävin ja mieltä myllertänein essee oli ”Unwell”, jossa Laing käsittelee Susan Sontagin ja Kathy Ackerin toisistaan suuresti poikkeavia suhtautumistapoja syövän hoitoon ja kuolemaan. Erityisen kiinnostavaa on, miten Laing lukee Sontagin teosta Sairaus vertauskuvana ja osoittaa myös tämän elämäntarinaan peilaten, että Sontag ei missään vaiheessa hyväksynyt tai sisäistänyt sitä, että hän tulee jonain päivänä joka tapauksessa kuolemaan. Sontag ripustautui lääketieteeseen ja otti vastaan kaikki mahdolliset hoidot – silloinkin kun ne tuhosivat hänen ruumistaan enemmän kuin itse sairaus. Itsekin sairastumisestani ja sen aikaansaamasta kuolemanpelosta esseen kirjoittaneena Laingin uusi Sontag-luenta värähteli tunnistettavalla tavalla niin, etten enää katso asioita samalla tavalla kuin ennen.
  
  Ilahduin tietysti myös Kate Bushin Cloudbusting-kappaleen ja Hounds of Love -levyn tiiviistä analyysista kirjan loppupuolella – se oli odotettavissa, mutta miltei hihkuin kun se tuli lopulta vastaan.
  
  Olivia Laingia pitäisi saada luettavaksi suomen kielellä: voin vaan kuvitella, miten hienosti hänen esseeproosansa soljuisi taitavan kääntäjän käsissä.
  
  ”We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting.”
  
  ”– – Illness as metaphor is engaged in a kind of magical thinking Sontag invented as a child: if you shut down feeling and deny the body, if you exist in a zone of pure thought, you will survive.”