Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto

by Anneli Rufus

Overview

The Buddha. Rene Descartes. Emily Dickinson. Greta Garbo. Bobby Fischer. J. D. Salinger: Loners, all—along with as many as 25 percent of the world's population. Loners keep to themselves, and like it that way. Yet in the press, in films, in folklore, and nearly everywhere one looks, loners are tagged as losers and psychopaths, perverts and pity cases, ogres and mad bombers, elitists and wicked witches. Too often, loners buy into those messages and strive to change, making themselves miserable in the process by hiding their true nature—and hiding from it. Loners as a group deserve to be reassessed—to claim their rightful place, rather than be perceived as damaged goods that need to be "fixed." In Party of One Anneli Rufus — a prize-winning, critically acclaimed writer with talent to burn — has crafted a morally urgent, historically compelling tour de force—a long-overdue argument in defense of the loner, then and now. Marshalling a polymath's easy erudition to make her case, assembling evidence from every conceivable arena of culture as well as interviews with experts and loners worldwide and her own acutely calibrated analysis, Rufus rebuts the prevailing notion that aloneness is indistinguishable from loneliness, the fallacy that all of those who are alone don't want to be, and wouldn't be, if only they knew how.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781569245132
Publisher:	Da Capo Press
Publication date:	02/15/2003
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	111,384
Product dimensions:	8.16(w) x 5.44(h) x 0.71(d)

Editorial Reviews

In Party of One, Rufus, an editor at the East Bay Express in California, mixes research, interviews, and opinion to make her case. But the author is most compelling when she homes in on a few concrete examples rather than piling them on without developing her points. The insightful chapters on the myths that loners are friendless and incapable of love are cases in point.—The Boston Globe

Rhonda Stewart

In this compendium of everyone who was anyone who ever spent a moment alone, readers bump fleetingly into Kurt Cobain, French Resistance fighters, the Lone Ranger ("Tonto notwithstanding"), Michelangelo, Alexander Pope, John Lennon, cowboys, Saint Anthony and other solo acts. Rufus, the books editor of East Bay Express, views Degas's plain-faced dancers as "pretty ballerinas" whom the artist leaves every time he exits his studio, and Warhol's biography as "tellingly titled Loner at the Ball." She chases her motif, not so much a manifesto as a cri de coeur, through an assortment of perspectives: religion, advertising, clothes, crime, art, eccentricity, environment, literature, religion and popular culture. She also identifies "pseudoloners" like Theodore Kaczynski and Jesus Christ (who "was too good at guiding crowds to have been one of us"). There's an us/them tone to this book that makes one wonder who the audience might be. The "us" people "do not need writers to tell us how lovely apartness is"; the "them" people will surely weary of being identified as "Nonloners. The world at large. The mob." Taken in column-sized doses, Rufus may be entertaining and informative, but her book feels as if too much random information has been cut-and-pasted together. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A witty essay about things best done on your own by admitted loner Rufus. Editor (presumably in splendid solitude) of the literary quarterly East Bay Express, our Lone Writer finds the conviviality of the wide world one huge pain and would like to not be considered nuts just because solitude and a room of her own speak to her soul. (Her loyal husband agrees.) Rufus discusses with brio the rewards of the sequestered life and the bothers imposed by gregarious outsiders in various sociological contexts. In film, lone heroes like Shane are overtaken by lone killers like Norman Bates. By the way, if popular culture is so popular, what has it to do with an anchorite beyond offering information as what the crowd is up to? Advertising, the ubiquitous power behind pop culture, reveals what everyone else will want, so who wants it? Not the true recluse. Don’t misjudge: loners have real friends, though perhaps not a lot and maybe they don’t visit frequently. And they have sex, too, though perhaps not a lot or frequently. Organized religion is a problem (it’s organized, after all), but the Internet is a stroke of luck. Solo adventure is a cinch, and so is eccentricity. Loners flourish in the creative arts and science. Emily Dickinson and Albert Einstein, Thomas Merton and Greta Garbo are among the many insular folks examined, along with Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and the D.C. snipers (losers misidentified as loners by the media). Sam Spade, Batman (but not Robin), and the author are simply reclusive, preferring independence to society. "Is socializing all that great?" asks Rufus. "Riots are socializing." Proceeding on the perhaps questionable assumption that loners are universally reviled, sheprovides a founding manifesto for an organization of self-contained people. (There would, naturally, be no meetings.) Or maybe it’s a book discussion topic for eremitic groups: join the stay-at-home crowd and read it alone. A clever and spirited defense, perhaps more energetic than the actual amount of prejudice requires.

Kirkus Reviews