Battling the Epidemic of Loneliness: A Review of SEEK YOU

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, by Kristen Radtke, is a gorgeous meditation on loneliness, made more poignant by its release in the second summer of the COVID pandemic, July 2021, a time when we were only just emerging from societal quarantine. A non-fiction graphic narrative/memoir/essay collection, it gets its title as a homonym of “CQ”, the letters CB radio operators transmit as an invitation for someone, anyone, to respond on a frequency. Loneliness is a longing for a human connection that one does not have, and Radtke delicately and devastatingly explores this longing and desperation for connection through technology that hides the emptiness behind promise of community.

There’s no linear argument or chronological tale in this non-fiction book. Instead, Radtke interweaves science and story, connecting what we know (and don’t know) about loneliness from evidence and study to people’s lived experiences with it. She presents vignettes in each chapter of a person searching for connections with others—a person who connects with sex workers and asks to be held and is left a few hours later, another who fosters online followers who turn away when tragedy strikes. Her focus rests most often on ways we use technology to fill that hollowness, whether sending radio transmissions to the void or feeling more connected when a sitcom’s laugh track kicks in, exposing how those patches cannot replace touch, connection, or familiarity.

Radtke pairs these experienced moments with scientific understanding of what happens in the brain when someone is alone and studies of monks who live solitary or silent lives. There are cruel studies of mice and monkeys and human orphans where scientists isolated subjects to watch the effects of loneliness emerge as anger, aggression, inability to connect, grief, and death. She weaves between studies and experiences so that you experience the feeling and learn why you feel it in the same breath, the same moment.

Here, loneliness is presented as an epidemic, which is more fascinating and pointed when you consider Radtke was writing it well before the coronavirus epidemic intensified loneliness to new depths. But the book pushes the reader to see it, identify with it, and then battle against it to forge human connection.

Presented in a soft, muted palette the shades of skin and space, the illustrations could be anyone and no one, drawing any reader in to make the experience theirs and at the same time anonymous. Yet the tones are warm, loving, soft, inviting. As Gabino Iglesias wrote in his review of the book for NPR, “The beauty of Seek You is that it feels like a communal experience. Reading this book is reading about ourselves and our lives.” Indeed, what makes the book so compelling is that the stories and the illustrations remind you of your own loneliness yet connect you with others. We all feel lonely. Together.