September 2025 Open Secrets Book Club Pick: 'The Loneliness Files' by Athena Dixon
Join us as we explore loneliness as we read Athena Dixon's memoir
Open Secrets Magazine is launching our new memoir and essay book club this month with memoir in essays The Loneliness Files by
, who writes our Radical Pleasure column. The New York Times Book Review called it, “An essential exploration of the isolation inherent in our era of virtual hyperconnection [that] also asks how we can find our way back to one another.”Here’s how it works:
You read The Loneliness Files over the next few weeks. On Monday, September 22, we will launch a Substack chat, open to everyone, to start discussing the book. You may join if you’ve read part or all of the book, but know we will be discussing the book in its entirety. That chat will remain open so you can return to it later if you have further thoughts on the book or overall topic.
On Tuesday, September 30, at 8:30 pm ET, we will be hosting a Substack Live Q&A with Athena and Open Secrets Magazine Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel. Follow the link above to access it; subscribers will be notified when the Q&A starts. We will post the full interview afterward for anyone who couldn’t attend.
You’ll have the opportunity to ask Athena your own questions during the Q&A, time permitting, and if you can’t make it live, you can leave those questions as comments in this post or in the chat and we will try to ask them.
Here’s where to buy the book, which you can also borrow or request at your local library.
Ebook
Audiobook
About The Loneliness Files:
What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness.
Living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets and working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred fifty miles from her family and friends, Dixon begins watching mystery videos on YouTube, listening to true crime podcasts, and playing video game walk-throughs just to hear another human voice. She discovers the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died alone, her body remaining in front of a glowing television set for three years before the world finally noticed. Searching for connection, Dixon plumbs the depths of communal loneliness, asking essential questions of herself and all of us: How have her past decisions left her so alone? Are we, as humans, linked by a shared loneliness? How do we see the world and our place in it? And finally, how do we find our way back to each other?
Searing and searching, The Loneliness Files is a groundbreaking memoir in essays that ultimately brings us together in its piercing, revelatory examination of how and why it is that we break apart.
An excerpt from “Say You Will Remember Me” from The Loneliness Files:
I remember loneliness because it is pervasive. It has a way of wrapping itself around me until it hides what’s actually true. It squeezes tightly in my mind until what makes sense, what’s actually happened, is distorted. Sometimes the loneliness makes me forget the goodness and the connection of my life. I find ways to compartmentalize these experiences until it is easy to remember only what I want. I think alone is sexy. Mysterious in its heaviness. Alone seems like a choice. Loneliness doesn’t. This seems like I’ve been forgotten, passed over, discarded. It can feel like the world is way too bright—just an expanse of whiteness with nothing else in sight. It makes me feel singular and small.
On the cusp of 2021, in a green dress and red lipstick, I told myself I could cry. One wailing, sobbing mess of a breakdown between sips of liquor because when I woke up the next morning the world would appear to be new. This New Year’s Eve was only a celebration of a year that needed to end. A year that saw some of us sink into isolation and others delve further into individualism and selfishness. This night was a cap to months of loneliness. A small bit of joy and release before heading into the bleakness of what seemed to be the coming year.
I’d checked out of the news months ago—too overwhelmed by death and discord that I felt myself slipping too much into darkness. This cry was a promise to myself that it would wash away the concrete deaths and dying dreams of what 2020 could have been. I had a book on the way and I’d finally started to find my voice when I’d been so sure I’d lost it. As selfish as my feelings may have been, it just wasn’t fair and I wanted to wallow. I cried and then danced until my body slowed to rocking, and when the countdown ended the loneliness came in like a wave.
My loneliness is not groundbreaking, though. And it is not tragic. It just is. Nothing more and nothing less. I don’t expect it to be important to anyone other than myself, but I write about it anyway. I turn it over like something precious in my hands—carefully as it floats across my fingers so I can see the details of it. Where dust and dirt and grit hide—the things that irritate and choke me when I breathe too deeply.
My loneliness is deep. It’s oddly comforting because I know what to expect. It’s like a light switch—sudden and complete—when it rears its head. My body starts to wind down and my mind disengages. Loneliness and isolation have been a slow build of contentment over the years before the sudden revelation of how the two are really disconnect disguised as choice. How between parents, a sibling, family, and friends is always fear that I will die alone. That no one will remember me.
***
Sometime before Christmas in 2003, London was headed toward the new year when Joyce Carol Vincent died in front of the television. She wasn’t found until January 2006. I was 25. She was 38. A set of coveted ages right in the middle of all the world is made for. I can only imagine we were a marketer’s dream. When we think of the world, youth and beauty are at the center of it all. As time moves forward, the distance between importance and ourselves grows wider, though. But in the waning days of 2003, Joyce and I were insulated in my youth and her beauty—important if only for those reasons.
Joyce and I were an ocean apart, the bookends of Gen X. This generation of latchkey kids who knew how to survive alone. Years later, they’d call us the Forgotten Generation sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials and far removed from Gen Z. Joyce and I had hurtled past the start of the millennium and emerged into a world that was falling apart and coming together at the same time. War and terrorism and the heightening of the world’s fears made an odd mix in a cloud of cyber connection. The planet was continuously in contact, yet somehow it was splintering at the seams.
2003 saw the start of the National Do Not Call Registry—another way to control access and ensure the links between us were ones we actually desired. The website 4chan began its path, and wars between the RIAA and music downloaders took to court. Between our emails and chatrooms and endless news cycles we saw everything, but we continued drifting into a world that seemed to only care about age/sex/location.
I wonder about the growing pile of electronic connections Joyce missed. Perhaps there was an extended away message on AIM or an inbox piling upon itself with spam. Had she started a MySpace during its first wave only for it to be abandoned without warning? Present day, these social threads seem so commonplace, but now how long would it take for red flags to raise? How long would her usernames have to remain dormant before someone thought to make physical contact? Without the constant expectation of likes and responses, just how much longer could she have lingered away from the fray even without her death?
More details from Athena Dixon:
Joyce Carol Vincent died alone in 2003 and her body sat in front of a glowing television for three years before the world finally noticed. The Loneliness Files, a collection of essays exploring disconnect and loneliness in a hyperconnected world, ponders if each of us is destined to be Joyce—a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of the world, forgotten by the rest of the living. So many who grew up in Gen X and beyond understand living parallel lives both online and off. To sometimes be a version of yourself ghosting just beyond the surface of your flesh. And how sometimes the disconnection that comes from escapism makes it nearly impossible to come back to reality. And there are those who also understand that the physical form can actually be the trap—the true place you are not properly fastened to the world.
Nearly 25 years after Joyce’s death, in Spring 2020, the world as we knew it ground to a halt. Streets emptied, shelves were bare, and the world quieted to a hum. A couple of weeks at home while the world righted itself seemed a gift, a way to reset from busy lives and expectations. But, as weeks turned into months and then into years, what remained of the initial excitement were the bare bones of relationships strained by too much closeness and self-reflection. The world learned all of us are actually lonely. Or disconnected. Or isolated. Or some combination of the three. The Loneliness Files explores the fine line we walk between these emotions, balancing each with joy and love and grief and fear.
We hope you’ll join us, and if you can’t read the whole book before our discussion, you’re still welcome to participate.
Feel free to use the below questions to get you thinking about the topic. We’d love to see your answers in the comments:
What does loneliness mean to you?
When was the last time you felt lonely, and how did you handle it?
What’s the difference for you in being alone and being lonely?