Olivia Laing
speaker
938 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Aug
Olivia Laing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then after that, it was sort of a little bit chillier between them, but they were really close.
And...
Everyone was devastated.
Everyone in the artistic community was devastated by Pasolini's murder.
And actually, just to say something else about that, there's a photo in this book of the funeral of Pasolini.
I mean, there's no point in me holding it up because you can't really see, but it's Campo di Fiori completely thronged with people.
And part of the reason I put that in is I'd read this piece in the FT that said, oh, when Pasolini died,
Nobody cared.
Everyone just thought he was like a dodgy old queer.
And actually that really isn't true.
Pasolini was telling the stories of the Bogata, the working class people of Rome.
And at his funeral, and I've seen film footage of this as well as photographs, those people came out for him, the boys, the men that he had written about, that he placed at the center of the story.
They came out and there's this really amazing footage of the coffin being carried through and people just...
raise their fists as the coffin passes.
Like, he really meant something, not just to intellectuals, not just to... In fact, the intellectuals didn't really like him, but to the people of Rome, he really was meaningful because he wanted to put their stories at the front of Italian culture.
Yeah, I feel the same sense of responsibility that I feel with nonfiction, which is deeply responsible and really I wanted to be very careful that I didn't wrong them or expose them in any way, that I was as honest and truthful as I could be within the realm of fiction.
I don't think that I made them do things that they wouldn't have done.
I tried very hard to make their sort of behavior plausible, even though obviously I'm inventing dialogue for them and I'm inventing scenarios that didn't completely happen.
But that really, that mattered to me, that sense that they had their integrity, that they weren't sort of shamed by being put into kind of laughable situations.
And I was really like, it was an experiment, this book.
Showing 541–560 of 938 · page 28 of 47
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