In this multilayered and masterfully structured book, Laing obsessively examines the life of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (a protege of Freud), drawing connections to other intellectuals, ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Malcolm X, while including stories from her own life.

Talk about timely: Laing began writing about bodies under siege over five years ago, and the book is being published in the middle of a pandemic. But we have become newly aware of the vulnerabilities of our bodies in the past year in other ways.

... brims with empathy. Never condescending or unkind, Laing explores the experiences of those crushed by feckless cruelty, shaken by cancer, or crazed by their impulses to eke out possibility, meaning and joy — all to achieve a semblance of freedom.

Everybody pulls liberally from Reich’s biography, but the doctor belongs more to the book’s form than to its content: his narrative provides the hard factual shell into which Laing can pour her ideas. Everybody is, per the title, an interrogation of bodies, but not in the sense that bodies are usually interrogated. The book skips over traditional sites of interest, such as health or appearance, to explore questions of force and constraint, and how, more abstractly, our physical forms can shove us into conceptual categories.

The formula works for her.

Given the vast, pervasive relevance of its subject, freedom, Olivia Laing’s new book about it is appropriately big—in scope, in reach, in feeling.

Laing steadily built her reputation as an editor and writer with an earnest sophistication. She doesn’t make her mark with arch observations or cool reserve. Her enthusiastic criticism is fueled by a political and humane connection as well as an aesthetic and intellectual one.

[A] well-intentioned yet ultimately exasperating book that would have been well served by the very thing it resists: clarifying constraints.

... exhilarating.

Everybody: A Book About Freedom finds Laing taking a similar approach as she masterfully shares stories of fascinating artists and historical figures.

... compelling.

Intrepid cultural critic Laing (The Lonely City, 2016) conducts incisive inquiries into complex subjects by assembling a galaxy of innovators with whom to commune. Here she takes a tangible approach to freedom by focusing on how our bodies.

... a beautiful, strange and sprawling meditation on the relationship between the body and freedom, which uses Reich’s ideas to chart the forces that shape and limit bodily freedom today.

Laing is exploring strategies to unravel the binomial view of physicality: life or death, freedom or confinement, health or illness. She argues that only by looking beyond these dualities can one begin to understand what freedom means..

The author dedicates the book to 'bodies in peril,' from individuals impacted by the European migrant crisis of 2015, to everyone impacted by COVID-19. It’s a statement that showcases the balance that runs throughout this book, with a recognition of how vulnerable we are, especially when our bodies belong to categories treated as disposable.

Reflecting on her fraught sense of embodiment, Laing creates a penetrating examination of the political and cultural meanings ascribed to bodies as well as the relationships of bodies to power and freedom.

Novelist and critic Laing (Crudo) places the life and legacy of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) at the center of this impassioned and provocative study.