Living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets and working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred fifty miles from her family and friends, Dixon begins watching mystery videos on YouTube, listening to true crime podcasts, and playing video game walk-throughs just to hear another human voice. She discovers the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died alone, her body remaining in front of a glowing television set for three years before the world finally noticed. Searching for connection, Dixon plumbs the depths of communal loneliness, asking essential questions of herself and all of us: How have her past decisions left her so alone? Are we, as humans, linked by a shared loneliness? How do we see the world and our place in it? And finally, how do we find our way back to each other?
Timely ... Uncomfortable ... While The Loneliness Files effectively captures the individual experience of loneliness, I found myself wishing that the book offered more acknowledgement of the potential systemic and societal causes of loneliness ... A convincing argument that being unfastened from the world, being intentionally untethered, has its own value. It has allowed Dixon to bring some of the truth of that experience back for others.
Doleful ... Most gripping, if most troubling, when it induces in its readers the kind of one-sided obsessions it describes and decries. But Dixon is better at evoking an atmosphere of desperate fixation than she is at analyzing loneliness, and when she stops writing about deaths and depravities and starts writing about her feelings, her prose lapses into cliché.
A thought-provoking memoir in essays ... Surprised and touched me ... Compelling ...The author is profoundly inquisitive, exploring and dissecting her eclectic interests.
