“Weren’t they simply grieving the random inevitability of their own lives?” she asks, framing it against the belief people have that those in the public eye should be more protected from the randomness of life, and if even they can’t be protected, then what chance do any of the rest of us have. She puts a finger on it with her ruminations on the British reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Rankine considers death, loneliness, old age, physical ill health and depression, examining how medicated everyone is becoming and questioning what people are inuring themselves against. We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that’s too complex. Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex. It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex. She frames the change in relation to the terror attacks. Originally published in 2004 and released in the UK by Penguin in 2017, this series of microessays that might be prose poems responds to a change Rankine feels in herself and in others around her in the years immediately following George W Bush’s election to a second term as US President and the 9/11 terror attacks. I have no recollection of why I reserved it at the library other than that I read an article that I can’t now find in which the writer of the article referred to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely in a way that made me want to read it. Tags 6degrees 20 Books of Summer 1001 Books Africa America Art Australia Autobiography Biography Black culture Black history Blogging about blogging Book review Britain Canada Comedy Crime Dystopia Economics England Fantasy Feminism Film France Germany Graphic novel Historical fiction History Horror Humour Independent Publisher India Influx Press Italy Japan Journalism LGBTQ London Mental health Meta Music Mystery New York Paris Philosophy Picture Prompt Book Bingo Poetry Politics Psychology Racism Randomness Religion Russia Science Science Fiction SciFi Scotland Short stories Six Degrees of Separation Sociology Spain Speculative fiction Sweden Thriller Tokyo Translation Travel United Kingdom USA Wales War Women's Prize for Fiction Women in translation Women in translation month Women read womenĬlaudia Rankine’s reflections on American society and the advent of loneliness is a strange and wonderful thing.

Dont let me be lonely claudia rankine