Writer Olivia Laing: "I realised very early on that not all bodies are treated the same"

In the world of words, British-born writer Olivia Laing is an all-round legend. An award-winning author and commentator, Laing has written six books that have been translated into 19 languages, including Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020), and her most recent release, Everybody: A Book About Freedom which came out in 2021. On top of being a much-awarded and bestselling novelist, Laing has written extensively on art and culture for The Guardian, The Financial Times and The New York Times, with her fearless and expansive exploration of what it means to inhabit a body in the wilderness of human society coming to a head in her latest book.

Ahead of her upcoming talk at the much-anticipated (and radical) Antidote Festival at the Sydney Opera House, Time Out sat down and chatted to Olivia about the shackles of the human body in 2022, her own experience as a queer person growing up in Britain in a gay family in the homophobic 1990s, and what she would get up to in Sydney for a day if time and space were no object. 

You look at the body with very different eyes to the rest of mainstream society. Can you explain what the human body means to you? 

I think when people talk about ‘the body’ they tend to mean health or physical appearance: fitness, beauty, fashion, things like that. I’m much more interested in what it’s like to live inside the body, in a vessel that’s so permeable and vulnerable, not to mention mortal. Before I became a writer I was a herbalist, and so in the 1990s I saw hundreds of patients who told me their life stories by way of their bodies. It was a stunning insight into what everyone carries around in their bodies, the impacted layers of personal history, often traumatic. I was also interested in how political our bodies are, how we are subject to unequal limitations and hostilities depending on the kind of body we inhabit. 

Why do you think bodily freedom is so important? 

I grew up in a gay family at a very homophobic period in British history, and that made me realise from very early on that not all bodies are treated the same. Some bodies are given wide-ranging freedoms, and some bodies aren’t, because of factors like gender, skin colour and sexuality. From gay rights and feminism to the civil rights movement, the freedom movements of the 20th century were in essence a demand that all people be accorded the same rights. What people wanted – what people still want – is to be able to love, to work, to travel, to procreate or not with the same expansive freedom accorded to the most privileged of bodies, those belonging to white men.

When it comes to matters of the body, what do you think is the single most dangerous factor in society today?

The rise of the far right, which went from a spent force to a live and terrifying threat over the past decade. What’s particularly dangerous and concerning is the way that white supremacist and misogynist ideologies are creeping into previously democratic states. In the UK we’ve seen the right to protest drastically curtailed and in the US the right to abortion has been erased. I think we’re heading into a more authoritarian world, and that the scarcity of resources that comes with climate change will only accelerate this tendency unless we resist it now.

You started writing your book, Everybody, in 2017, during a time in history that you’ve called a ‘place of despair’. Do you still feel this way? What do you think has and has not changed since then? 

I started writing Everybody during the refugee crisis, Brexit and the rise of Trump. We’re now in the aftermath of those events. There’s been positive regime change in various places, including the US and Australia, but we’re clearly in a worse place in terms of the chaotic and accelerating changes associated with climate change. In the UK we’re in the midst of the highest temperatures and most severe drought of the last century. Pandemics, global recession, the war in Ukraine: none of it looks good. At the same time, this could be a wake-up call about the need to respond fast and hard to climate change. This is our last-minute warning and we must heed it, and make sure that social justice is to the fore.

What was the wildest story that stood out to you whilst researching and writing Everybody? 

I plan a cast at the beginning of a book but it often changes as I go along. The main character in this book is Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian sexual liberationist who ended up dying in an American prison. I was idly looking through a list of who else had been in that prison –Mafia dons, mostly – and saw a civil rights activist whose name I didn’t recognise. It was Bayard Rustin, and the reason I hadn’t heard of him is that until very recently his work in the civil rights movement was minimised because he was also an out gay man. Rustin became a major character in the book – brave, outspoken, very funny – and he illustrated exactly the way in which bodily attributes bring about limitations of freedom, even in movements that are trying to seek it.

As a herbalist and gardener, what have you found to be the antidote to the mayhem of the 21st century? 

This might not be the most popular view I hold, but I don’t think humans are the most important species. Shocking, I know! So what I really love about gardening and being outdoors is being immersed in a non-peopled world. And gardeners give me hope, too. Not everyone wants violence or profit. Some people are content to tend the earth, to create an abundance of beauty. People have always made gardens, right back to the beginning of history, and it’s this aspect of humanity that gives me the most hope.

You are currently working on a new book on gardens and paradise. What does paradise feel like for you? 

Right now, in the midst of a drought: water. Pollen. Rivers, gardens, bees. A green, abundant, fertile, seething world of diversity. The earth as it was is paradise to me.

Finally: if you came to Sydney for a day, and the time-space continuum was no object, what would you ideally want to do? 

This is an easy question: swim, swim, swim. I would spend the entire day drifting from ocean to Art Deco pool. I want to go to the Olympic Pool and Bondi Icebergs and Fairy Bower and Coogee Women’s Baths and bliss out on salt water. 

Olivia Laing will appear at Sydney Opera House’s Antidote festival via livestream on Sunday 11 September, 2022, in a talk titled ‘The Body Free & Powerful’ examining how bodies encounter oppression and resistance and reshape the world in an appearance. You can book in tickets to see her right here for $33.