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.
Q Who do you interview and what have you learned?
I interview all kinds of people. The point is to get a range of guests who, hopefully, reach a range of listeners – cataloguing their expressions of loneliness, showing that it’s something we all feel. That is what I’ve learned, or what has been reinforced: everyone feels lonely sometimes. Of course, for some it’s chronic, and some are better at dealing with it than others but, in general, it’s part of the mixed bag of emotions involved in the human experience. Perhaps that understanding will make people feel less alone.