On Loneliness - by Terri Laxton Brooks (Paperback)

About the Book

Terri Laxton Brooks spends her whole life feeling --but it's only after divorcing her husband and moving to an entirely new city on her own that she's finally able to confront the trauma of loneliness that's haunted her for years . . . and learn to embrace and heal from it.

Book Synopsis

In this no-holds-barred, provocative book, Terri Laxton Brooks tells a story that often remains hidden-- that of a successful professional who has many friends and family and yet all her life has struggled with a loneliness she's never revealed to anyone.
Terri thinks her feelings of isolation will end with her marriage to her childhood sweetheart and their move from a farm town to the city of Chicago. But once the sheen of newlywed passion wears off, her husband, by nature reticent, grows even more emotionally distant. In her new job as a reporter for a Chicago paper, Terri hides her loneliness under a flurry of bylines and deadlines. But she can't shake a feeling she's had since childhood--of failure to connect, not just as a wife but also as a daughter, friend, and colleague--and soon she and her husband separate. Adrift, Terri contemplates suicide. Could a move to different city, to a fresh start, solve her problem?
Terri's decision to transplant herself to New York City forces her hand in a way she never imagined: it plunges her into a loneliness so total that out of desperation she grabs the key to her own salvation-- love of interviewing, researching, hearing people's stories. After starting therapy, her curiosity leads her into four years of soul-searching conversations with America's leading psychologists and psychiatrists about how to cope with loneliness, why it is a normal and necessary stage of healthy growth, and how to stop resisting it. She explores with growing understanding intimate details of her dreams, her past traumas, and her role in her own loneliness--and learns not only how to live comfortably with that loneliness but how to use it to her advantage.

Review Quotes

Past Praise for the Author:

"A provocative, important, and timely book for all who are willing to admit their lonely feelings and take steps to overcome them."

--Dr. Wayne Dyer, author of Your Erroneous Zones

"If you read only one book this year, let it be this. It just may change your life."

--Gloria Vanderbilt, artist, author, heiress, and socialite

"A book I wish I had read in my early years . . . I might have grown up a little sooner had I been able to share the author's frank insights into the nature of love, sex, and loneliness in their various aspects. I hope youths of all ages--from sixteen to sixty--will read it."

--Howard Koch, primary screenwriter of Casablanca

"[W]ith rare insight, the book shows us how to accept our loneliness--then, as we stop resisting it, how to use it to our advantage . . ."

--Publisher Blurb (Penguin Classic, 1st ed.)