“It meant I can carry on doing strange things,” Olivia Laing tells me from their home in Suffolk. Laing is best known for genre-defying books that blend memoir, essay, history and biography. In all my work, I’m interested in fluidity, complexity, ambivalence, and that’s true politically and socially too.”[ Olivia Laing: ‘People find it hard to grasp things like racism, or misogyny, because they genuinely can’t see they exist’Opens in new window ]This fluidity, as Laing says, runs through their work. So we might be surprised that Laing’s new book – the purpose of our discussion today – is a more traditional novel. “We’re not perverts,” Donati tells him, “we’re labourers in the dream factory!”“There’s a lot of teasing of each other,” Laing says.

Source: The Irish Times November 08, 2025 15:34 UTC