Hey, everybody, welcome to the Other People podcast. Happy Sunday. I am Brad Listy. I'm here in Los Angeles. It is good to be with you. I appreciate you tuning in, and I hope you're doing all right wherever you are. Don't forget to subscribe to this show.

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So my guest today is Athena Dixon, author of a memoir in essays called The Loneliness Files.

And I think that I've slipped far down the mountain of loneliness a couple of times where I

theoretically know that I've been alone too long and that sometimes I can get so oppressive that you don't know how to get out of it. And probably one of the best thing this happened through writing this book and having some of my family and friends read it so far has been they're like, we know now to ask you. We know now to check in a lot more with you because we just assume that you're always okay with being by yourself. We always assume that you're fine because you don't say that you're not fine.

So that's been like the blessing of being able to finally talk about some of this stuff

is that people really are like, we assume outwardly that you're okay, but we know that you're not now.

All right, that was Athena Dixon.

Her new memoir in essays is called The Loneliness

Files. It is available from Tin House. The Loneliness Files is a very candid collection of

autobiographical essays about alienation, fear, depression, death, community, and family, and of course, about being alone.

Athena Dixon writes with bracing honesty about living alone as a middle-aged woman,

without children or pets, working a full-time job from home, living more than 350 miles from her family and the friends

she grew up with. This book explores Athena's search for connection, her examinations of

the depths of communal loneliness, and it also confronts a range of difficult questions, including personal ones, like,

how have her past decisions left her so alone?

And are we as human beings linked by a shared loneliness?

And if so, how do we find our way back to one another?

I had a very interesting conversation with Athena Dixon.

That is coming up in just a couple of minutes. A quick reminder to please subscribe to my

weekly email newsletter. You can do that over at Substack. The newsletter is pretty simple. I let you know

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