Dossier
Q Your podcast is described as ‘an exploration of the feeling of loneliness, solitude and aloneness’. What was your motivation to start The Lonely Hour?
At the age of 33, I was a single woman living in New York, looking for partnership and not finding it. That made me feel lonely – and the fact that many of my friends were feeling alone, too, made me lonely for us all. Combine that with the way technology has changed the dating game – and the way we connect, or don’t, in general – and modern society was looking bleak to me. A way of dealing with that was to launch the podcast and confront loneliness head-on. My being upset with singledom may seem like the obvious answer to why I created the podcast, but there were bigger reasons: I had read reports detailing our society’s increasing sense of social isolation; I observed the ways in which technology is distancing us from one another; I saw more people freelancing or working alone. I wanted to explore all that.