SECRET PANDEMIC

A writer ties the trauma of her upbringing to worldwide trends in loneliness and connection.

In this debut book, Heng combines a memoir with a self-help guide. She explains how she came to understand the lack of genuine human connection in her life and how it kept her from being fulfilled. At the same time, she investigated the broader global experience of loneliness and social isolation and how these have been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, who grew up in Australia in a Chinese Singaporean family and later spent time in Switzerland, Dubai, and Singapore, discovered in adulthood that the dysfunctional norms she grew up with were a unique combination of cultural factors and her parents’ physical and mental illnesses. All of this left her without a strong sense of self or connection to others. Through therapy and research, she came to understand how the behaviors learned in her youth set her up for unhealthy relationships and inauthentic links to others. Each chapter mixes a personal story with big picture data from medical and psychological research and ends with Heng’s recommendations for how readers can strengthen their own relationships, build community, and combat loneliness for themselves and others. The book does a good job of making itself relevant by demonstrating the depth of the global problem of loneliness, and the author’s international perspective brings some variety to an often America-centric genre. Heng has a talent for vivid imagery (she remembers that her father “would come home from golf with arms like Cadbury top deck chocolate, white beneath his capped sleeves and dark brown on his forearms”), which makes the volume an easy and engaging read. The work’s nonlinear path through the personal elements of the author’s story (she moves back and forth between caring for her aging mother and recounting the childhood experiences that negatively shaped their relationship) can feel a bit meandering at times. But the serpentine narrative eventually reaches an emotionally satisfying conclusion that allows Heng to make a convincing case for how she has gone from a victim of loneliness to an adviser to others in the same position.

A solid blend of autobiography and self-help manual that addresses a global concern.