Barrelhouse Reviews: The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon
Reviewed by McKenzie Watson-Fore
Tin House / October 2023 / 192 pp
“Loneliness…has a way of wrapping itself around me until it hides what’s actually true,” Athena Dixon writes on the first page of The Loneliness Files. This memoir-in-essays traces Dixon’s complex relationship to solitude and, ultimately, mortality.
The book opens on New Year’s Eve 2020, as Dixon floats in the doldrums of a seemingly endless pandemic-induced isolation. Loneliness has stalked Dixon for most of her life, but the social distancing required by the pandemic has pushed her to a new extreme. “I think I forget what it feels like to have another’s skin against mine or the warmth of breath ghosting past my face,” she mourns. In the context of a society simultaneously more and less connected than ever, Dixon posits loneliness as an experience worthy of consideration. Perhaps thoughtful attention can teach us how to coexist with the loneliness, to keep us from being swallowed.
According to Dixon, loneliness is “disconnect disguised as choice.” The question of agency reverberates throughout: does Dixon want to change her situation, and what will that change cost? Does she actually want the solitary life represented in the book? Or is it something she’s merely settled for, because the cost of transformation and the risk of self-exposure are too high? “The truth can be heavier than your burdens so you keep carrying them,” she notes.
Each of the first three essays fixates on a different woman who died alone: Joyce Victor, Elisa Lam, and Geneva Chambers. Their bodies weren’t found until weeks or even years later. “I’m obsessed with these lonely ends,” Dixon confesses. Her interest in their stories stems not from the investigative impulse of an amateur sleuth but from a sense of recognition and identification. “More often than not they are a reflection of me.”
To a society that only recognizes value in what can be shared—pics or it didn’t happen—the choice to willfully self-isolate reads as inscrutable. Of Joyce Victor, Dixon asserts, “No one understands just how she came to be a near recluse who’d quit her job and died alone. I do.” When engagement with the world became too much, Victor sank into disconnection. Dixon sees herself sinking in the same way. “I know it is easier to appear to be what everyone expects than to show them who you truly are.” Disconnection becomes a passive way of affirming truths that feel too difficult to bear into the world.
Dixon’s sustained attention humanizes these women. By referring to them almost exclusively by their first names, she creates a network of vanished outsiders, demonstrating intimacy across barriers of time, place, and even mortality. Where loneliness writes a reductive story of meanness or misery, Dixon looks long enough to wonder about the pain and disappointment that caused these women to withdraw. For instance, when Dixon probes deeper than the reductive caricature drawn by Chambers’s dismissive neighbors, she finds the outline of a woman unwilling to play society’s games of respectability, to project a false front, a woman who “refused to live by social graces.” In that judicious summary hovers a whiff of admiration.
The narrator of The Loneliness Files is the opposite of a people-pleaser. She will not compromise in order to make herself palatable to a society that she suspects will reject her. These tensions become most explicit in “The Ruin of Rom-Coms,” wherein Dixon navigates the often-demeaning digital world of dating apps. The objectifying messages she receives leave Dixon “feeling so far flung from the center of desire that it’s beginning to make little sense to even try.” But she longs to connect in a way that affirms her dignity and leaves her privacy intact. “What I miss most about being truly coupled is the mundane intimacy of it all,” she says.
Throughout the book, Dixon maintains deliberate and methodical prose. She eschews contractions and any grammatical flourish that would expedite her consideration of loneliness. The slow pace is integral to Dixon’s project. “Sometimes my home echoes,” she states, “and I am doing my best to manage this both physically and emotionally.” Measured sentences draw the reader into the emotional dome she inhabits. The book’s even tone avoids associative leaps and instead mirrors the quotidian effort to keep going, day after day.
“Deprivation” chronicles Dixon’s experience floating in a sensory deprivation tank, during which she “mull[s] over the word deprivation. How it ends softly at the purse of my lips and what it means. An act or instance of withholding.” Her time in the tank makes literal the book’s concerns. The prose can feel narrow, claustrophobic, or even myopic, but this replicates the experience of being trapped in the psyche, limited to the diminishing pleasures of one’s own company.
The final section, “Coming Home,” questions the impact of living far away from aging parents. These five short essays carry the most affection in the book, particularly as Dixon traces the legacy and memories of her late grandmothers. The occasion of her maternal grandmother’s death prompts a return visit to Ohio, the subject of the collection’s penultimate essay. In the post-industrial landscape of her hometown, Dixon finds a reflection of her inner landscape: unconventional, certainly, but not lacking in possibility. “Here is where the lesson lies,” she quotes from an essay published in 2015. “It’s what we do with the empty that defines us. It’s what we fill those spaces with that either rebuilds or destroys us.”
Finally, Dixon makes it to another New Year’s Eve, smeared with grief. “Between the liquor and takeout I remind myself this sort of New Year’s Eve is not unique in the world,” she acknowledges. “There are so many like me.” Survival is its own accomplishment, especially during the pandemic era. “This week my aunt was claimed by COVID-19,” Dixon reveals. “I believe, when I am true to my actual feelings and not putting on a brave face, that life is a series of tiny deaths.”
The collection is bookended by the deaths of women both known and unknown. Bearing witness to these deaths is a form of truth-telling: cutting through the illusion to acknowledge what really is. The collection reaches no great crescendo, but perhaps that’s part of the point. Memento mori suggests that remembering the inevitability of death will spur greater intentionality in our lives: clarity around the choices we make and the ways we choose to show up in the world. “Each morning is the grief of the night before,” Dixon writes. “It’s what’s in front of us—new life—where we should focus.”
McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and critic based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and participated in the inaugural Emerging Critics program with Anaphora Literary Arts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Write or Die, Psaltery & Lyre, Full Stop, and elsewhere. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.