In fall 2024, British author Olivia Laing had the wildest writing experience of their career. Over the course of three sleepless months in Rome, Laing wrote their new novel The Silver Book, a queer historical thriller and love story set in Italy in the months leading up to the 1975 murder of subversive film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. They’re still processing how they did it so quickly.
“It was magical and a little frightening because the speed that it was coming out required a huge amount of energy,” Laing says over Zoom from their studio at the Barbican Centre in London. “I was working from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. and would take these long walks in the middle of the day. I was snatching sleep and going, Oh God, I’ve realized what happens next. I’d be typing as fast as I could, with the sense that I could hear the words.”
One of the most incisive literary voices working today, Laing writes about art, sex, identity, alienation, politics, and the environment. They’re the author of the 2018 novel Crudo and six nonfiction works—including The Trip to Echo Spring, about writers and drinking, and The Lonely City, a meditation on creative expression and aloneness—that have been translated into 22 languages, according to the author’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Laing is also something of a cultural polymath. Their work abounds with references to paintings, literature, and films, and it’s impossible to read one of their books without getting turned on to some new artistic creation. In The Silver Book, out in November from FSG, Laing pays homage to 1970s Italian cinema and examines how movies can both inspire and become political lightning rods.
The dazzling novel, which seamlessly mixes real life figures and fictional characters, is set in the turbulent world of Italian filmmaking during the Years of Lead, a time of social and political unrest. It focuses on the relationship between Nicholas, a young English artist with a dark past, and famed Italian costume and set designer Danilo Donati, who takes Nicholas on as his assistant and lover while working on two provocative films of the era: the sexually charged Casanova, directed by Federico Fellini, and Salò, a dark fable about fascism, directed by Pasolini.
“Pasolini was the first cultural figure in 1975 that understood that fascism was going to come back, so that idea of him as a seer, as someone who understood the world that we’re now waking up to—that was central to me,” Laing says. “My books are always about art as a place of refuge. Art and the resistance to fascism and oppression.”
Mitzi Angel, Laing’s editor, was instantly taken with The Silver Book when she read it last year. “Olivia is endlessly curious, brave in their art making, and that extends to their personality as well,” Angel says. “They’re driven to know more about everything.”
Born in 1977 in Buckinghamshire, Laing says that as a kid they felt like “a right fucking weirdo.” Their parents separated when Laing was young, and their mother married a woman who turned out to be an alcoholic. “Growing up with a violent and frightening alcoholic was traumatizing and the sense of that trauma has stayed with me,” they explain.
Having come of age in England when homophobia was rampant, Laing thought of themself as a “gay boy” when they were young, and now identifies as trans. “It’s essential of everyone who’s in the public eye of nonnormative gender to make that visible,” Laing says, “because it’s so hard for everyone who’s trans right now.”
Laing spent their late teens and 20s trying to figure out their path and became drawn to the natural world (they love gardening) and environmental issues. They dropped out of college after a year and spent time doing environmental activism before getting a five-year degree in herbal medicine, in 2003, from the University of Wales. “People say, Oh, you’re a homeopath, did you do a weekend course? And it’s like, No, I did clinical training; I did anatomy, physiology, chemistry!” Laing says. “I’m always furious about that.”
Laing practiced herbal medicine from 2003 to 2008 (“I used to send people away with their teas or little bottles of horrible tasting liquid”); worked as the books editor at The Observer from 2007 to 2009; and then began writing. Their first book, To the River (a work of nonfiction about the Ouse River, in Sussex, England, where Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941), was published in 2011 and shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. It was followed by The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which was inspired by Laing’s time living in New York City in their 30s.
“Loneliness is a kick in the teeth,” Laing says. Writing has been a saving grace, but it hasn’t been easy. “I talk regularly about how difficult I find writing. In every way, writing The Silver Book was unusual. It was like an extraordinary tidal wave I was riding.”
In the book, Laing whisks readers into the colorful world of Cinecittà, the famed film studio in Rome where Donati and Nicholas generate set and costume ideas for Casanova while dealing with moody Fellini. Donati and Nicholas then work on Salò, a film about violence and sadism set in the 1940s that made Pasolini a political target. In the buildup to Pasolini’s brutal and mysterious murder, Laing spotlights queer life in ’70s Italy and considers the sacrifices that artists make in pursuit of their vision. Along the way, they celebrate human ingenuity and the process of making things from scratch.
“I was very interested in this world of constant illusion,” Laing says. “We’re in this world now of artificial intelligence, where everything’s digitized, cheapened, trashy, and these are people who are making things by hand.”
PJ Mark, Laing’s agent, is impressed by the author’s intellectual fortitude and eagerness to try new things. “Olivia is always writing ahead of culture,” Mark says. “The Silver Book is about making art in a time of rising fascism, and what it means to express oneself even at the risk of annihilation.”
When Laing isn’t writing books—or taking photos for fun—they’re writing catalogue essays for art exhibitions. The author regularly writes about the work of painter Chantal Joffe, and recently did some writing for a museum retrospective on actor Tilda Swinton. Laing’s London studio—which they share with their husband, the poet Ian Patterson, whom they met via Twitter and married in 2017—features some of the art they’ve been given by friends, including a portrait of the rapper Jay-Z by Joffe. “I nagged so much,” Laing quips, “she just gave it to me.”
Laing says the driving compulsion of their life is to write books and send them out into the world. “I’m glad The Silver Book wasn’t my first book. I can really appreciate it as a very strange experience without thinking it’s going to come again.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
