Moments in Everybody that do grasp at the analytical are often common-sense statements delivered with an air of profundity. Having told us that Malcolm X did a lot of life-changing reading while incarcerated, for example, Laing explains: ‘Prison was where Malcolm X became free, but that didn’t mean he approved of it as an institution.’ This is one of several statements that, surely, should go without saying. At other times, would-be analytical statements seem completely out of place, and serve solely as clunky segues between one story and the next. Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin argued from prison that if incarcerated people were to receive medical care and proper food the outcomes would be positive, writing: ‘If the law of cause and effect still operates in human relations, the answer seems clear.’ Awkwardly, Laing seems to take issue with the semantics of this point in order to move on to her next anecdote: ‘But nothing is clear in human relations. We all want many things, and those things do not always correlate or align.’ Not an untrue statement, but hardly an argument against imprisoned people deserving food and medical care.

The biographical subject at the core of Everybody is Wilhelm Reich, a renegade Austrian psychoanalyst who, in his early career, tried to marry the theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and in his later career made a name for himself as the inventor of two pseudo-scientific devices: the orgone box and the cloudbuster. Laing’s writing on Reich is some of the strongest in the book, and as she delves further into her research and discovers things about him that she finds ‘repulsive’ – he was homophobic, and he beat at least one of his wives – her grappling with the contradictions between his character and his ideas adds complexity to Everybody’s themes.

At times, I wished Laing had simply written a straight biography of Reich. It is when Everybody ventures too far from him as a subject that the flow of both its prose and its ideas starts to feel strained, and there are many instances when Laing makes links between Reich and other subjects that feel like a stretch. The chapter ‘Cells’ – which is about imprisonment and focuses largely on Malcolm X and Rustin – begins by describing Reich’s stint in prison, which seems like a strange way to open a chapter primarily about the incarceration of Black men. Rustin, a gay Black civil rights activist, decides to serve his time quietly after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima: ‘Reich too,’ Laing informs us, ‘was horrified by the atom bomb.’ Agnes Martin, a queer American abstract painter, is linked to Reich because ‘both were driven by that promise of contact which they longed to make available at large’, which could mean any number of things and apply to any number of people; Nina Simone’s connection to Reich was that she sometimes sang a cover of ‘Pirate Jenny’, ‘a song from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, which had been playing everywhere the year that Reich arrived in the city’. There are other links that feel similarly tenuous: in the middle of a long section on Simone, Laing suddenly draws a jarring parallel between Simone and Andrea Dworkin, whom she had discussed four chapters earlier: ‘[Nina] found [her husband’s] violence shattering and unendurable, just as Dworkin would when her husband began to beat her in Amsterdam a year or two later.’

Despite its subtitle declaring this ‘a book about freedom’, the result of all these strained connections is that Everybody doesn’t feel like a book that knows what it’s about. Were its themes – ostensibly, freedom and the body – more rigorously examined by Laing herself, rather than so much of its thinking taking place by proxy, perhaps there would have been enough of a thread to hold together the disparate tangents and biographies.

Everybody often feels tonally strange, given its subject matter. Describing the aspirational purity and sexlessness of KKK uniforms, Laing writes: ‘It’s funny how often this dynamic recurs, in racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, hatred of the poor and disabled.’ Starting a sentence like this with ‘it’s funny’ effects a tone of distanced curiosity, and Laing’s tendency towards understatement when writing about horror can make her prose feel eerily detached. To use another illustration: ‘In America,’ Laing writes, ‘Trump too regularly uses terms like “animals” to describe immigrants.’ Trump doing this once would surely be too frequent, and so the curious addition of ‘too’ makes this statement feel inappropriately mild.

In an interview with Maggie Nelson in May 2021, shortly after Everybody was released, Laing reflects on criticisms of her 2014 book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On writers and drinking, which explores the careers and alcoholism of ‘six extraordinary men’: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. ‘There’s lots of feedback like, “Why are you writing about men and not women? Are you a misogynist?”’ Laing tells Nelson. But as she explains, her reason for not including women in the book was more complicated: it hit too close to home. Laing grew up with an alcoholic woman in her family, ‘and it was just impossible for me to read those stories’. However, she did go on to include essays about women alcoholics in Funny Weather (2020). Talking to Nelson in 2021, she reflects: ‘The sad thing about that is that the stories about women were way more interesting, and I kind of wish I had written that book.’

This is revealing about where some of the strange, removed affect in Everybody stems from. This is not to say that the best books always come from authors directly mining their trauma – our tendency to ask for or expect that kind of work can lead to both harm and bad writing. But due to the distance Laing puts between herself and her subject matter, the ‘book about bodies in peril and bodies as a force for change’ is not the book Everybody ended up being. And while I enjoyed much of the biography in Everybody, I kind of wish that Laing had written that book.