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Everybody

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Everybody

By: Olivia Laing
Narrated by: Emily Pennant-Rea
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About this listen

Everybody is a fierce, vital exploration of what it means to have a body in the modern era.

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Despite its difficulties, the body remains a source of power, even in an age as technologised and automated as our own. Everybody is at heart a celebration of how ordinary human bodies, whatever they look like, can resist oppression and reshape the world.

©2021 Olivia Laing (P)2021 Audible, Ltd Art Essays Freedom & Security Gay Studies LGBTQ+ Studies Political Science Politics & Government Heartfelt Social justice

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All stars
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Superb, thought provoking compelling. Well read. As soon as it was finished I wanted to listen again

Superb and compelling

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Amazing work, as ever by Olivia Laing. She writes such interesting essays which all connect, weaving together people and subject matter. Every book of hers I've read has left me with names and places I want to research and find out more about - and a desire for her next to come along quickly.

The narration is good, just not great. I would listen to something else read by Emily Pennant-Rea, but I wouldn't search her out particularly.

Every Female Body (Review of Audible version)

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I’ve just listened to all of her books, bar the city one, in a row. Olivia Laing is beautiful, she takes me out on a boat and puts on her scuba gear and dives down bringing me up ever more wondrous treasure. Think I’ll go again and then go through all the books that she quotes from. A great source for a dyslexic therapist cycling to work. Thanks Olivia.

Amazing

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I loved this, although parts were hard to listen to. It drew together lots of things I was a little familiar with into a whole that was new to me and hit me hard. Laing's final words were identical to my recent thoughts. I'm reading The Book of Trespass at the same time and there's some interesting overlap between the two books in the discussion of protest movements in the UK and the nature of political power over bodies.

Perfect, painful.

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This is a wonderful book but unfortunately parts were ruined a bit by taking me out of the book, by the narrator mispronouncing things. Eg “Mesa” is not “messer”, and expose is not exposes

Fab book, average narrator

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So interesting and engaging. Some strange mispronunciation but otherwise a solid clear reader. Will listen to more

Brilliant book very well narrated

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This book feels like almost like a companion to Orwell’s Roses only with the human body as the focus rather than the climate. In the same way as Solnit uses Orwell as her framing, Laing uses Reich and his work and using that takes on a interconnected journey through feminism, illness, sexual freedom, art and so much more.

I found myself learning deeply about areas of medicine, psychology, feminism, art, gender, and the rise of the far-right in the early 20th century that I only had the basic facts on before I began reading. It helped me understand arguments I had previously dismissed because there were nuances I wasn’t aware of and helped me re-work and re-centre some of my own issues with my health and my feminism.

This is a book that was both enriching, eye-opening and eminently readable and I would encourage anyone to give it a try.

Enriching, eye-opening and eminently readable

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This book is really well-written and well read; however; the topic darts around with a feeling of self-importance of the writer and a lot of uninformed statements thrown out there as fact. I was quite bored and frustrated with the style but it was marginally more interesting than looking at the tube map so I stuck with it.

Well written but a lot of ideological fluff

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