Olivia Laing: ‘People find it hard to grasp things like racism, or misogyny, because they genuinely can’t see they exist’

Olivia Laing writes beautiful, idiosyncratic non-fiction in which they survey big themes via the lives of other people. They have written about writers and alcohol (The Trip to Echo Spring), loneliness (The Lonely City) and what it means to exist in painful, politically objectified bodies (Everybody). They have also published one novel, Crudo.

Their new book The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise is in part a memoir of someone overhauling an idyllic walled garden in their home in Suffolk, but it’s also about the historical ways in which beautiful gardens have been used to hide colonial crimes and conjure up utopian visions for society.

If Laing has a consistent subject, it’s alternative ways of living.

“That comes from growing up in a queer household,” they say. (Laing is non-binary and uses both they/they and she/her pronouns; I asked their preference for the piece.) Laing’s mother was in a lesbian relationship at the time of the Aids crisis and section 28, a British law prohibiting the “promotion” of homosexuality.

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“There are these invisible lines in society and if you don’t come up against them, you’re not aware that they’re there,” they say.

“Some people find it so hard to grasp things like racism, or misogyny, because they genuinely can’t see that they exist. But if you have those experiences of being on the other side of those lines, then they’re violently present. And I think that sense of genuine rage that I grew up with, fuelled everything that came after. So I dropped out of university at about 19 and went and lived on the road protests.”

These are the environmental protests against infrastructural projects in areas of ecological importance in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “I was at one in Ireland for a while,” Laing says.

At the Glen of the Downs in Wicklow? “Yes! I was up in the trees. I remember very distinctly arriving late at night and having to climb up into the trees and being like woah!” (Later they say, “My mum’s Irish. She’s always saying, ‘Why do you never say to Irish people your mother is from Ireland?’”).

The protest movement had a big effect on Laing. “I fell in love with that lifestyle. I fell in love with the romance of people living in the trees but I always felt like an outsider. The place that I feel most at home and at ease is the queer community, because that’s where my roots are, that’s what I grew up in, and because I’m a trans person,” Laing says.

“Protest culture was, in some ways, very welcoming, but it was also quite heteronormative, and had quite aggressively male and female traditional roles. That might have changed now. I’m very drawn to those movements but I feel like maybe it’s my temperament or being [a writer], you’re kind of watching and slightly at a distance at the same time.”

Laing ultimately left the environmental protests behind, though they retain an activist’s political consciousness. In their essay collection, Funny Weather, they write about a period living in an isolated house in the country with no electricity.

“I think I was having a breakdown at that point,” they say. “Like lots of protesters, I was really burned out. I was experiencing the kind of climate grief that I guess a lot of people are experiencing now. And it was a punishing winter. But also, it was amazing, because it was almost like dissolving back into the landscape.”

In their 30s Laing did a conversion course in journalism and worked for the Observer for a period. Their first book, To the River, was about the river Ouse in which Virginia Woolf drowned. This was followed by The Trip to Echo Spring. Laing has pioneered a sort of non-fiction that explores the psychosocial-literary terrain around a subject area in a way that often feels very personal.

“They’re philosophical investigations into areas of human experience like alcoholism, like loneliness, like the body. And those questions aren’t abstract for me. They’re deeply personal,” Laing says.

“I started to write about alcoholism, because I’d had childhood experience of living with an alcoholic [their mother’s partner]. I started writing about loneliness because I was intensely lonely. But I’m really not interested in writing a memoir that just says, ‘This is my experience’. I try and find a cast of characters [usually artists, thinkers and scientists] that have experienced the same sort of distress or disorder or trauma. I want to make these beautiful maps of strange and difficult places that I think are overlooked.”

Laing likes to reclaim misunderstood figures, spending time with, for example, the iconoclastic queer activism of the artist David Wojnarowicz (in The Lonely City), the sexual and social liberation of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (in Everybody) or the utopian aspirations of the socialist designer William Morris (in The Garden Against Time). The fact that their visions didn’t succeed in their lifetimes does not make them failures, Laing says.

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“[Reich’s] ideas about pain and trauma living inside the body and being manifest inside the body and the complicated relationship that our lived experience has to our health, all of that is now becoming evidence-based normal medicine. Freud [Reich’s mentor] had this idea that everyone should adjust themselves to civilisation and society, no matter how deforming that process but Reich says: ‘Why don’t we change society so it doesn’t do that?’

“I think that question, which is half naive and half revolutionary, is really interesting. And it’s a question that you probably only have if you’re pushed to the margins, if you have that experience, personally, for one reason or another.” They pause. “But more and more people are being pushed to the margins.”

I want to write about reality. And I want to keep asserting reality in its complicated, ambivalent and ambiguous ways

Some of Laing’s protagonists fell from grace. Reich was a controversial figure who later lost himself in bad ideas and pseudoscience (he invented a scientifically dubious device called the orgone box, supposedly to restore energy to those who used it).

“If you’re trying to resist abusive systems, you become damaged and I wanted to show that in quite a granular way. There’s an understandable desire to cast people out when they do something wrong, but it’s not going to get us anywhere,” Laing says.

“We’re all complicated people. And I have real problems with call-out culture and with cancelling. I don’t think that it’s helpful right now. The left has this obsession with purity and wanting things to be perfect and it means we spend time tearing ourselves apart as the right moves on.”

That doesn’t mean, Laing says, that we should shirk from confronting the consequences of real power imbalances. In The Garden Against Time they explore how a nearby stately home, Rutland with its beautiful gardens, was built up with money that the Middleton family made from slavery. They liken it to the Sackler family using money from the opioid crisis for art gallery donations.

“This is the 17th- and 18th-century version of that story, laundering their slavery money by way of making gardens that literally elevate them through the class ladder. By the end of it, they’ve got Queen Victoria coming to visit them.” They are aware of how outraged some people in Britain get when people point out these darker legacies.

“People are so angry when they’re given any evidence of pain and violence happening in close proximity to them. It’s what the Zone of Interest is about, that people can live pleasant lives cheek-by-jowl with violence,” they say.

Laing often works from a deep connection with their subjects. In the Lonely City they were given access to David Wojnarowicz’s archive and in The Garden Against Time they were writing and gardening amid the gardening legacy of their house’s previous owner, another gay man, Mark Rumary. Laing and their husband, poet Ian Patterson, bought the house and its grounds in 2020.

“Particularly with gay men, I feel those kinds of strange intimacies through time. As an artist, you’re leaving things in the hope that somebody responds to them. Wojnarowicz was the most intense experience I’ll probably ever have of that because what he left behind was so intimate. There was his very battered wallet and his jacket. I had these home videos where he’s swimming and these audio tapes where he’s talking very honestly and directly into your ear. Writing Lonely City, there was so much in that about masculinity and gay masculinity, that was me working something out for myself. It leaves a note or something that some people pick up on, and some people don’t,” Laing says.

In Everybody, too, there are some short references to Laing learning more about existing as a non-binary person. “There’s a couple of sentences that to me were huge, and loads of people don’t notice at all, but I know that when trans people read my books, they’re like, ‘Oh, this is a trans person talking about being trans’.”

That’s the space I’m interested in writing about, the truth that our disobedient imperfect bodies introduce us to.

The Garden Against Time, despite its darker subtexts, feels like a recuperative work. Does Laing see gardening as an art? “Yeah, I do. But I think I’ve got less and less interested in it as a visual performance. I cannot stand seeing a well-designed perfect garden, it just bores me to death. I’m interested in gardening as a space that’s relational. And I’m interested in the experience that I have inside it, the encounters with other species, the sense of what plants are going to do. I’m sort of looser and looser now with how I garden because I find it fascinating when something just crops up somewhere and it’s like, ‘Oh you want to be there?’

“Making it look pretty has become very boring to me. Things that are at peak bloom aren’t necessarily the most useful thing in the garden whereas what’s rotting and dying is just so much more interesting.”

Is writing like gardening? “It felt more and more uncanny how similar they were as processes,” they say. “For me, writing is mostly about editing and taking things away and stripping things back. It’s about looking and then thinking ‘That’s the thing that isn’t working’ and taking it out. I structured the book like the garden, it’s a series of rooms and you move one to the next and I wanted the reader to feel like they stepped into a new space with each chapter.”

When I interviewed the journalist Gary Younge, he talked about the importance of “complexifying” things in his work. Laing agrees. “The most important thing that I’m doing with my writing now is trying to show the complexity of things that have been turned into cartoons. Trans lives are a good example of that.

“I can’t begin to understand how that’s been chosen as a culture war subject, with the reduction of everything into good or bad. I feel like it’s a very skilled distraction technique of the right, that I have no interest in. I want to write about reality. And I want to keep asserting reality in its complicated, ambivalent and ambiguous ways and at the same time, keep saying, ‘There are other ways that we can live.’”

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Do they worry that people are losing their appetite for complexity thanks to the reductive effects of social media and tech algorithms? “We’re told all the time that people want simple stories. I find that not only untrue, but offensive. It’s my experience that people can deal with very complicated and difficult ideas. Whatever AI-based reality we’re moving into, we still live in these bodies that sicken and die; we still experience loss,” Laing says.

“That’s the space I’m interested in writing about, the truth that our disobedient imperfect bodies introduce us to.”

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise is published by Picador. Laing will be speaking at the International Literature Festival Dublin on May 21st at Merrion Square Park in Dublin, see ilfdublin.com