Crudo: How to Unfold Yourself Without Burning the World Down
The central tension of Crudo is the friction between the solitary "I" and the terrifying "We." Kathy, longtime denizen of the "solitary ocean," fears the "domestic cage," believing that to belong to another is to lose the radical edge of the self. But she begins to discover the generous architecture of love.
“To love is to be vulnerable,” C.S. Lewis famously observed, but in our age of terminal acceleration, vulnerability is a luxury we often trade for the armour of irony or the digital distraction of the infinite scroll.
In Crudo, Olivia Laing — a cartographer of the human heart’s most isolated territories — offers a luminous and jagged meditation on what it means to be a person, at this specific and precarious moment in history, trying to stay open while the world insists on closing.
The narrative is a daring exercise in combinatorial identity. Laing’s protagonist is a "Kathy" who is both herself and the ghost of the punk-poet Kathy Acker. More than just a literary artifice; this is also a profound recognition that we are all collages of our influences, "plagiarising" the courage of those who came before us to survive the rawness — the crudo — of the present.
Laing writes against the backdrop of 2017’s political vertigo — a season of nuclear threats and a frantic, pixelated anxiety that mimics the staccato rhythm of a Twitter feed. It is a portrait of the modern mind: overstimulated, terrified, and yet, stubbornly alive.
THE ALCHEMY OF COMMITMENT
The central tension of the book is the friction between the solitary "I" and the terrifying "We." Kathy, a longtime denizen of the "solitary ocean," finds herself getting married. She fears the "domestic cage," believing that to belong to another is to lose the radical edge of the self.
But as she moves through the heat of Italy and the noise of the news, she begins to discover the "generous architecture" of love. She realises that commitment isn't a narrowing of the horizon, but a widening of it. That perhaps, to love is not to surrender one’s freedom, but to find a witness to one’s existence.
THE UNFOLDING AT THE END
The book’s conclusion is not a resolution of the world’s chaos. The news remains bleak, the flights are still delayed; but there’s a resolution of the spirit. Standing at the airport, on the verge of departure, Kathy experiences a sudden, tectonic shift in her internal landscape. Laing writes:
“She’d never loved anyone before, not really. She’d never known how to do it, how to unfold herself, how to put herself on one side, how to give.”
This "unfolding" is the ultimate act of courage. It is the moment she stops being a "raw" nerve reacting to the world and starts being a participant in it. She realises that "Love is the world, pain is the world," and that there is "nowhere to hide."
Reading this, I felt both awe and fear. I see myself in Kathy’s hesitations — the prickly anxiety of wanting to love fully but also fearing the vulnerability it demands. I fear that giving myself so completely will leave me exposed, that my heart could fracture under the weight of expectation or disappointment. Yet at the same time, I long for this very unfolding, the courage to stop recoiling from love and to trust that it can be as grounding as it is terrifying.
Kathy’s moment of recognition is in the acknowledgment that love is something one actively chooses, that giving is as much about courage as it is about joy… feels like a call to arms. I wonder: could I ever trust myself enough to do this? To place my heart in the hands of another, and still remain intact? Could I accept that the fragility of love is not a weakness but a kind of bravery?
In this ending, Laing reminds us that while we cannot control the storm of history, the relentless chaos of politics, or the fracturing influence of digital life, we can control the quality of our presence within it. To love is to be “in” the world, to stake a claim in its beauty and its heartbreak. The book closes not with resolution of circumstance but with resolution of spirit. And in that, I feel both fear and hope — the fear of being truly seen and the hope that, perhaps, I could choose to unfold too.
