Name: Seek You
ISBN: 9781524748067

Kristen Radtke

"When Kristen Radtke was in her twenties, she learned that, as her father was growing up, he would crawl onto his roof in rural Wisconsin and send signals out on his ham radio. Those CQ calls were his attempt to reach somebody--anybody--who would respond. In Seek You, Radtke uses this image as her jumping off point into [an] ... exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another"--

A Journey Through American Loneliness

Seek You

Stas

Loneliness isn't necessarily tied to whether you have a partner or a best friend or an aspirationally active social life in which you're laughing all the time. It's a variance that rests in the space between the relationships you have and the relationship you want. Loneliness lives in the gap. 

Human children know well that a simple way to gain access to a group is by tormenting someone apart from it. The weakness of an outsider is repulsive to someone desperate to stay inside.

I'm really enjoying the political commentary in this, because instead of just going "boooo they're bad" it's giving an explanation to why people can end up in such ways. It's also so well done through the art, it's a great reading experience. 

If loneliness can cause us to lose sense of what is real, how do we function within a country that is constantly telling us what we trust and know cannot be trusted or known.

[...] it seems to me quite possible that we have always been a very lonely people.

It's hard not to imagine now that my mother was mourning herself, too, when she cried for Diana. Though their lives held nothing visibly in common, Diana spoke freely about a loneliness I couldn't see then but that my mother surely felt as a woman who spent nearly all her time alone in a house with small children. 

The art in this is amazing, and goes so well with the information in the book. It's an easy read, and brings up a lot of topics, without getting too messy. 

Sarai Johnson

Radtke's book is an accidentally timely essay in the form of a graphic novel. Written starting in 2016 but coming out during 2021, Seek You explores dimensions of loneliness and contemporary understand of it, using the author's own experiences and family history as a narrative jumping off point. Deeply beautiful at times, and necessary reading for a "post-pandemic" world, the book would have felt like a more profound examination prior to the universal bone-rattling loneliness that was experienced in 2020. Many of the author's observations are universally applicable in a way that feels moot based on revelations of our shared loneliness of the lock-down era but the research itself compelling, specifically in light of the author's proximity to the Las Vegas shooting several years ago. 

Quentin Gibeau

Maytal

Milly Schmidt

Pamela M McGowan

Jayme Bosio

Fiona Coffey

Maggie

From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This—a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns. In Seek You, Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share. Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally-charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.

Seek You A Journey Through American Loneliness

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