Intimacy & Solitude – new edition 2021
Intimacy & Solitude: Finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world
No. 1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER UPDATED IN 2021
“This is a book that can save your emotional life. Finally, someone has deeply, compassionately explored the territory of intimate relationships that can bring such grief as well as joy. Throughout, it offers insights, transformation, and hope. It can surely inspire you to start again.” Subhana Barzaghi, psychotherapist and Zen Roshi
The quality of your personal relationships has never mattered more. We need to give and receive closeness to feel fully alive. But do we dare explore our needs and vulnerability in a world that can seem harsh, judgemental and increasingly unpredictable?
Intimacy & Solitude is genuinely ground-breaking, as well as compassionate and wise. It starts with the most fundamental relationship of all: how you understand and care for your own self; how you see and define “identity” to yourself; how your sense of “self” guides the way you see and respond to other people. In an age of extreme anxiety and destabilising competitiveness, a stable sense of self brings incalculable benefits and a quiet confidence built on self-knowledge and the capacity to care for others.
Using her exceptional gifts as a storyteller, and based on extensive, diverse interviews and research, Stephanie Dowrick brings to life profound and persuasive insights to transform self-trust – and, crucially, to radically enhance your life with others.
As with all Dowrick’s writing, this book is race, sexuality and gender sensitive.
Published by Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Print edition, e-book and audio available.
ISBN: 1740510755
Random House Australia 2002 (Revised and expanded) First published 1991
An international best-seller, this book allows us to understand our relationships with others through a deepened and more self-accepting relationship with ourselves. Six years in the writing, this highly researched yet supremely accessible book was Stephanie Dowrick’ s first major best-seller. It has sold more than 100,000 copies in Australia and New Zealand alone and is a classic in its field. It is of profound help to people undergoing what is perhaps an essential crisis of self-awareness, or those who want to understand what intimacy asks of them, as well as how it can most reliably support and reward them. Widely translated.
“Offers penetrating insights into some of the most basic paradoxes of human relationships” The Guardian (UK)
“Intelligent, eloquent and wise” Metro (NZ)
“A book of tremendous depth and power” Maxine McKew, The Bulletin (Australia)