Assuming there are no Malcolm Gladwellian coincidences, there must still be something to the fact that just as I received my copy of Leah Vincent’s memoir, Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood, I kept falling into Internet wormholes that led me to articles on the science behind Loneliness.

Most articles stress only what Loneliness isn’t. It is not mourning, or clinical depression, or feeling disconnected from your significant other. It isn’t something that can be with any certainty tied to an age, an ethnicity, a gender, or a socio-economic bracket. In fact, one can be lonely when surrounded by people, because loneliness, according to the New Republic’s science writer Judith Shulevitz, is ‘œan interior, subjective experience, not an external, objective condition.’

And then, as I was reading Vincent’s book, I gasped. I had come to the part where the young protagonist is living by herself in a basement in Brooklyn, struggling to get by on a pitiful salary and with not a friend to her name. It was one of the most wrenching depictions of true, bone-deep Loneliness I had ever read: