Everybody: A Book About Freedom

Written by Olivia Laing

Narrated by Elizabeth Sastre

“Astute and consistently surprising critic” (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century ? among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781705034491

Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

Reviews for Everybody

[grandpahobo_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Its very difficult to write a review of this in less than 500 words that does it justice. Its both an exploration and a history of how societies fixation on classifying people by the traits you were born with has been used to oppress and control them. Its dense and requires a lot attention, but it well worth it.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Laing is such a fabulous writer, not only are these essays interesting but they also teach, empathize and she always leave some wanting more. In these she uses Wilhelm Reich to tie these essays together or maybe I should say she uses him to guide us through what freedom for our body actually means.From Isherwood and Weimar Berlin she explores the sexual freedom that was prominent, where all sexes, what one was or wanted to be was not judged. From freedom to McCarthyism which was almost the opposite. From illness, using Sontag and her will not to submit to the cancer eating away at her body, to Agnes Martin, who wanted to escape from people and her mental illness. Malcolm X and Nina Simone, all the different freedoms they wanted but did not have, though they fought for them. There is so much here, people who found freedom, people who want to take away others freedoms, these essays exemplify both the body's power and it's vulnerability. A truly terrific grouping of essays.ARC from W. W. Norton and Edelweiss.

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everybody: A Book About Freedom is an odd and fascinating book of essays in which Olivia Laing is touching on many subjects about bodies, sexuality, and the elusive concept of freedom itself. She does all of this with her usual passion and intelligence. One of the significant touchstones of the book was Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), an Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst. The book also follows many of the people who were inspired and influenced by him, such as: Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmond Freud, Malcolm X, Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Kathy Acker, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, and Susan Sontag. At times, it’s as if Laing’s attempting to create a social history of all these streams of thought during a very provocative period. All of this brought together in one place is all quite a trip. Reich was a most original thinker, and he may be known best for popularizing the term “sexual revolution” back in the 1930s. He also developed the concept of orgone energy (universal energy that animates all life), and how sitting in one of his simple accumulators helped people to absorb that energy through their skin and lungs, and thus improving the flow of life-energy and by releasing energy-blocks. [Allow me, as I feel oddly compelled to mention that Woody Allen adopted and nicknamed the box as the 'Orgasmatron' in his 1973 film Sleeper. Laing also seems to take great relish in taking some excellent jabs at the Trump movement.] Reich also created the Cloudbuster, a device he had created to influence the atmosphere, to make it rain or keep it from raining. Both devices were outlawed by the FDA, because of all their health claims. Reich and his Cloudbuster also strongly influenced many songs by Kate Bush, including most all of her Hounds of Love album.Olivia Laing also writes very personally about her childhood growing up in an openly lesbian household. I found her discussion of how she personally identifies herself sexually, and how it has evolved over time, very fascinating. Growing up, she always felt like a boy. “At the time, my own gender was like a noose around my neck. I was non-binary, even if I didn’t yet know the word.” As she got older, it all became more confusing as more options and labels became part of the mix. She now openly identifies sexually as non-binary, neither male or female, and wrote about how the term Mx. is much more widespread in United Kingdom—even on governmental forms—as a way to assign no sexual identity whatsoever to a person.She goes deep into the history of several sexual, peace, social, environmental, and musical protest movements, some that she was quite involved with. Laing became so involved with road protests that she dropped out of university altogether. During some of these environmental protests she was living in treehouses. Overall, it is a rather wide-ranging book, but I never had a good grip on exactly what she was trying to do with the book, or maybe she was going for everything. Maybe it was a search for an overarching definition of what freedom is. As a whole the book is a provocative look at all its topics and made me feel better and a little more hopeful, which is a major achievement nowadays. She starts the book with this line. “This is a book about bodies in peril and bodies as a force for change.” I find myself still thinking and pondering about the book.