Kristen Radtke's Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness defies categorization—and it does so in spectacular fashion. At once a memoir, a personal essay about loneliness, an exploration of the science of solitude and its effects, and an invitation to come together in a world built to separate us, Seek You looks at isolation as a problem and investigates where it comes from, how it shapes us, and why we should battle against it ... In Seek You, Radtke's cuts to the marrow of our inner lives as well as our online lives and public selves to explore the ways in which community, interaction, and even touch affect us, especially when these elements are missing ... The beauty of Seek You is that it feels like a communal experience. Reading this book is reading about ourselves and our lives ... Seek You accomplishes a lot and its unique hybrid nature makes it a must-read. However, perhaps the most important thing it accomplishes is telling everyone that they aren't alone in their loneliness, and that could be the first step into ending the loneliness epidemic.
[Radtke] returns this month with Seek You, an exploration of loneliness in America, a subject that has become increasingly germane in the five years since she began her project. The result is another resonant, haunting volume of graphic nonfiction written and drawn in the key of Edward Hopper ... Her subject may be timely, but Radtke, the art director and deputy publisher of the Believer magazine, is never superficial or fleeting ... she does not shy from big, potentially overwhelming questions ... Seek You isn’t the downer one might expect, given its sobering subject matter. If you accept that loneliness — like the impermanence at the heart of Radtke’s first book — is a fact of life, you might take comfort in being reminded that you’re not alone in this widely shared condition. There’s comfort to be found too, in the skillful elegance with which the author conveys her ideas.
... [an] immersive, novelistic and intensely humanistic book-length graphic essay ... the book curls through autobiographical episodes ranging from her Wisconsin suburban childhood to New York adulthood in which Radtke illustrates both the loneliness of physical solitude and of crowds. These make up some of the book's lovelier sections with Radtke's enigmatic text contrasting with her richly precise, Chris Ware-ian illustrations of darkened buildings illuminated by bright rectangular windows framing people in solitude ... Some of the more personal moments in Seek You feel only tenuously connected ... But most help to illustrate the wider and richer geography of disconnection that she explores in a work whose aching, keening sense of humanity is almost as powerful as its evocative artwork. There is so much empathy in Radtke's approach, she can even muster up sympathy for Harry Harlow...who most would call a monster ... Radtke's approach here purposefully mirrors that of those ham radio operators sending CQ signals out into the void, not necessarily with anything to say but just wanting to connect.
... a devastatingly gorgeous book that does for loneliness what The Noonday Demon did for depression—an expansive, wondrously expressive, profoundly empathetic look at social disconnection. As many of us mull over what emerging from quarantine means, it's hard to imagine a more perfect companion to help process that and the past year and a half ... Marvel at Radtke's elegant lines, her elegiac prose, and the capaciousness of her head and heart.
Radtke integrates disparate materials, and yet the structures that result aren’t solid or sharply defined. Seek You is full of ghostly hatch marks, thin lines, and muffled scenes washed in shadowy reds, blues, and purples ... Radtke considers the antiheroes of prestige TV: Don Draper, Walter White, Jimmy McNulty. This terrain is well-trodden, but, by emphasizing the characters’ misery, Radtke finds a fresh angle. Her tone is neither reluctantly charmed nor righteously angry ... On this point, I wished for more: What relationship is being proposed between love and loneliness? Radtke prefers to present her examples, her totems of disconnection, straightforwardly; it’s possible to wring from them surprising analyses, but this work is left largely to the reader. Such restraint can be frustrating when the material—canonical psych results, a meditation on social-media mourning, an inquiry into the Trumpist mind-set—feels so familiar. And yet, paging through Radtke’s book, I was again pulled in by the deserted streets and darkened rooms, and by the anonymous, sifting crowds. Ambience can go where words cannot. One can sink deep into the images of Seek You without realizing that one is looking at anything at all.
... some aspects already feel a little dated. But if she were to include the effects of recent social distancing and isolation requirements, it would be an entirely different book, one that she indeed hadn’t intended to write ... takes readers on a much larger trip through loneliness, making a claim that it is not inherently specific to any one era, but instead suggests the idea that humans are always prone to it to some degree. Depicting Radtke’s personal experience with solitude, scientific research about how loneliness can wreak physical havoc on our bodies and the cultural conditions that have set Americans up to especially feel this pain, the book reaches very wide in its scope ... In many ways, it meets the mark, serving as an entertaining and informative encyclopedia of seclusion. But the book’s thesis is scattered, and Radtke’s thoughts can appear to tumble over themselves, leaving readers to flip back and forth between pages, wondering what thread they might have missed ... While this book is a very well-researched piece of nonfiction, Radtke’s writing does veer into the poetic, especially when she describes her own experiences with loneliness ... aesthetically stunning too. Radtke’s illustrations are expressive ... Despite the many sections of this book that are lovely to look at, containing much thought-provoking and readable prose, the book remains a non-intuitive read. I think this is where the otherwise deftly-deployed comic format fails: if you are required to scrimp on words when connecting such far-reaching thoughts and research, it’s easy for your narrative to come across as scattered ... It feels dizzying to go back and forth between microbiological details of how loneliness can physically alter our brain chemistry and intimate stories of Radtke’s friends’ loneliest moments in only a few pages, and neither narrative gets a fair shot at more development ... Even after all of this rich analysis, Radtke does not reach a sensical conclusion about her thoughts on gun violence and its place in our culture. This is completely understandable—it’s a big issue!—but it becomes a bit tiring to read such meandering thoughts, even if they are written beautifully and accompanied by engaging illustrations ... It’s a simple thesis that has served as the basis for gorgeous and important art and literature for time immemorial, but it is complicated in this piece of graphic nonfiction that tries to be too many things.
This is among the book’s greatest strengths: to attune its readers to the nuances of loneliness. Radtke interrogates this pervasive but often shame-filled aspect of the human condition through stories that move between wide-ranging decades and contexts, including her own experiences living in Wisconsin, Las Vegas, and New York, and pop cultural representations ... In the most visually arresting drawings, we see wordless, full-page images of one person overwhelmed by their environments, often tinted in cool blues or greens. But, there were times that I longed for the text to linger with Radtke’s narrative, to more intimately dissect her own obsession with loneliness. Her self-portraits also felt drawn at a slight remove; on a few occasions, I compared them to photographs on the internet, to confirm the drawing was of her. In the end, I still appreciated the space Seek You’s fragmented structure leaves for readers to fill with their own self-interrogations. I felt rewarded when I returned to the image of Radtke within the Kusama installation and noticed her use of a rare warm yellow, which radiates across her figure. I took this to imply that connecting with another human through her art offers not so much a solution to feeling lonely but a kind of solace in which we can both lose and find ourselves.
Her book is a valuable tool as we continue to grapple with the pandemic ... Her panels—often spare, with single figures floating through voids of space and ocean—tease out her themes. Her assured line drawings, eye for composition and borrowing from photography enhance her investigation ... She writes candidly about nomadic treks from the Midwest to New York ... She also depicts another American city, Las Vegas, with brio; her illustrations sketch the city she found beneath the facade of casino lights and hotel marquees. At her best, Radtke mirrors the country's post-Trump anomie with her own aching loneliness, illuminating a lifetime of mental struggles with candor. But the book has an Achilles' heel: Its second half doggedly erases the interior lives of men, reducing their emotional realities to those of TV characters ... Regrettably, this binary of men as predatory ogres and women as sanctified victims mars an otherwise fascinating book ... On balance, Seek You is a valuable contribution to an emerging form that daringly marries words to pictures, evoking pictograms, the earliest writing, in a book that comes full circle through the ages, limning the condition of loneliness as a constant source of agony and ecstasy, and perhaps something we all may need.
The writer and illustrator’s latest work of graphic nonfiction is curious, compassionate, and, yes, occasionally whimsical ... Radtke collages different genres—autobiography and social science and criticism—rather than drawing out a single story or argument. The effect is one in which fewer insights are revealed than they are assembled. Her chosen subjects can feel on the nose, as in the section where she describes untraditional methods to alleviate loneliness, like hiring platonic cuddlers or nursing homes giving seniors robotic companions. Radtke skips over more enriching (and free) solutions in favor of these quirky band-aids. Why investigate one but not the other? ... Seek You is better the more personal it gets, as when Radtke talks of dating compulsively in her 20s ... Paired with shadowy portraits of each speaker..brief stories are stunningly specific, recalled immediately. It’s one of the most striking passages of Seek You, and it subtly illustrates a dynamic that’s not acknowledged here directly: that the very act of naming the thing that plagues us, both to ourselves and each other, may lighten its burden on us.
Seek You is an ambitious but failed experiment that relies on a grab-bag of techniques to fill pages. Radtke picks up and discards formal strategies without ever finding a visual conceit to hold the book together ... The book’s most compelling and fascinating moments are born from sequential storytelling ... Radtke sometimes finds interesting ways to depict loneliness on the page: Seek You includes many drawings of isolated, presumably lonely people who are often framed by windows or else standing alone on the blank expanse of a page. One of the book’s most poignant scenes includes several full-page depictions of anonymous figures sinking languidly into the depths of a blue-green ocean ... But these moments of clarity are outliers. Some images are redundant, and in places the narrative text is simply a caption ... More often, Radtke’s page designs are just difficult to decipher. Her extensive use of a collage-like technique means different images are sometimes stacked in a discordant jumble ... Radtke was too quick to leave behind the well-trodden territory of panels and narrative. Seek You got lost on its way to somewhere else.
Radtke weaves together snippets of scientific research, pop culture and memoir with her own evocative artwork. Forgoing the panel format typical to graphic novels in favour of one or two-page spreads, she captures the architecture of aloneness and the protective postures our bodies assume in shared spaces ... Radtke draws an important distinction between solitude and feeling lonely ... doesn’t so much suggest solutions as the salve of solidarity.
The book combines documentary, memoir, reporting, and stunning art: low, dark colors with the occasional neon, making the reader feel like she’s floating on a reflective surface, a reflection with no original...Through vivid images of people fumbling with house keys late at night, falling asleep on the subway, leaving a liquor store, Radtke shows how recognizable and universal loneliness is—but also how easy it is to remove ourselves from others’ loneliness, to turn theirs into an experience incompatible with our own ... This type of generous reading of other people and their loneliness is what Radtke’s book seems to call for—a willingness to read loneliness where we might otherwise see monstrosity, to read love where we see loneliness. Widespread loneliness is not a problem just for the chronically lonely; it says something ugly and true about all of us. Reading Seek You forced me to rethink my own various brief interactions that left a lonely person feeling lonelier.
The innovative structure of Seek You reinforces [...] universality, exploring loneliness through a kaleidoscope of perspectives ... The text weaves together disparate threads of American pop culture, sociology, evolutionary biology, psychology, history, and memoir with an essayistic flair—not surprising ... The result reads like an illustrated essay, a longform collage influenced as much by Leslie Jamison as Alison Bechdel ... While some readers may not be ready to sit with this subject, others may find Seek You well-timed for a critical step we’ve collectively neglected—processing what we’ve endured this past year.
Radtke uses both words and images to powerful effect in this deep exploration of loneliness in all its facets ... The art is stunning, creating a Hopper-like effect of disaffected isolation. Even more amazing, Radtke is able to keep up the interest and intensity page by page, creating a kind of graphic documentary deep dive into loneliness. The art goes a long way to keeping our interest. Although her writing is strong, the book would definitely be less powerful without her brilliant use of imagery to expand on the text, to create mood and meaning. The art somehow keeps the book from becoming too depressing to bear, as a book on loneliness easily could be. Radtke has found the right balance and given a sterling example of how graphic novels are uniquely able to get readers through tough subjects.
Kristen Radtke is a narrator as unflinching and bold as readers should be before approaching this graphic novel. Seek You demonstrates how loneliness is an experience that’s both universal and achingly unique—which is why it shouldn’t scare or embarrass us ... For lovers of creative nonfiction, this title has the rare ability to interweave facts with personal anecdotes in such a way that one cannot help but feel a little less alone ... Radtke makes loneliness an exercise in being together in our unique aloneness, instead of becoming isolated within it.
“In graphic-essay style, Radtke centers her inquiry around four human behaviors—listen, watch, click, and touch—and devotes rich, meandering chapters to each . . . Radtke’s crisp, vector-drawn illustrations more than hint at reality; rather, in their layering and arrangement, they seem to reproduce it in truer, more emotional detail. Provocative and companionable, this will spark conversation and, undoubtedly, connection among readers.”
“Deeply affecting . . . Radtke is an engaging and thoughtful guide through our fear of being alone . . . Superb. A rigorous, vulnerable book on a subject that is too often neglected.”
“Gripping . . . Combining personal narrative with social science, evolutionary biology, and pop culture analysis, Radtke’s work is innovative in form and painfully relevant in content . . . Somber illustrations range from journalistic to starkly symbolic, in variations on gray that establish a flat and lonely world, making the gradient sunset hues that sometimes burst through that much brighter . . . For a treatise about the perils of being alone, [Seek You] creates a wonderful sense of being drawn into conversation.”
“In often poetic prose accompanied by stunning illustration, Radtke weaves together personal anecdotes and examples drawn from physical and mental health studies to create a meditation on the causes and cost of isolation . . . An insightful and compassionate investigation of loneliness.”
