New Common Book highlights mental health, loneliness epidemic

Katie Farthing, Staff Writer

VCU chose “Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness” by Kristen Radtke to be the 2023-2024 Common Book. 

The Common Book program aims to explore different social issues and bring VCU students and staff together to discuss these issues, according to the Common Book website. 

Previous Common Books focused on issues regarding climate change, voter suppression, poverty and racism. The most recent book focused on Bruce Tucker’s death and the role of the Medical College of Virginia, or MCV, according to a previous article from The Commonwealth Times. 

There are multiple academic requirements that must be met for a book to be considered as the Common Book, according to Constance Relihan, dean of university college and the acting director of the Common Book Program.

“A book needs to address an issue that’s important and current,” Relihan said. “It needs to be a text that helps students look at things from a context they might not normally, so it helps people get outside of themselves a bit.” 

The selection process involves the provost and a campus-wide committee, including faculty, graduate and undergraduate students and student-submitted ideas, according to Relihan. 

“We want as much input as possible and we want to make sure that we choose a book that resonates with a large swath of the campus,” Relihan said. 

The book focuses on the complex issue of loneliness and mental health, according to Relihan. 

“My hope is that it will help students understand ways in which they can connect with each other,” Relihan said. “Maybe it will help them be able to identify warning signs of loneliness in themselves. It will help them be able to reach out to each other.”

It’s a graphic non-fiction novel and the committee thinks it will resonate with the arts in ways that previous books didn’t, according to Relihan. 

“It’s really wide-ranging in the topics that it brings up and so we’re hoping that there’ll be a lot of ways for us to connect with each other,” Relihan said. 

The University College department asked Katelyn Harlow, a senior English student and peer mentor for the Focused Inquiry Learning Lounge, to read the book and give a student perspective, according to Harlow. 

“It’s definitely super relevant to the digital age that we live in, as students,” Harlow said. “So much of our lives are online and where the intent is to feel more connected to people, it can almost feel like the opposite, like more isolating.”

The book acknowledges how vital a sense of belonging is to people, now more than ever, according to Harlow. 

“I think people are really realizing the importance of community and feeling a sense of belonging to those communities,” Harlow said. 

Gabino Iglesias, a book critic, described the book as having a “hybrid nature” and defying “categorization” in an NPR article.  

“Perhaps the most important thing it accomplishes is telling everyone that they aren’t alone in their loneliness, and that could be the first step into ending the loneliness epidemic,” Iglesias stated. 

Loneliness is a prevalent issue that deserves more of a discussion, according to Radtke, author of this year’s Common Book. 

“I mean, it’s exciting to think about so many different types of people reading the book together, especially writing about loneliness,” Radtke said. “We have to have a conversation around it, so it’s really great that that will be happening in a classroom.” 

Loneliness is something that most people experience but she never thought about it critically or artistically until it started showing up in her writing and she began researching, according to Radtke. 

“I think that loneliness is something that’s been on our minds for a lot of reasons, but also loneliness has been becoming more and more of a problem even before the pandemic,” Radtke said. 

College is the time for making connections as well as learning, according to Radtke. \

“The relationships you have in college can be relationships you have forever and those friendships are how you figure out who you are and where you belong,” Radtke said. “ I think that that’s really valuable, so, I hope that this is a reminder of that.” 

Radtke will speak at an in-person keynote address on Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. in the Singleton Center for Performing Arts and there will be events leading up to the talk.