The Great American Loneliness is an autobiography in the form of short narratives written between the Seventies and the Nineties, its central theme the journey of an artist in the middle of his life where the way is sometimes lost. The opening narratives, which move from America to India in the aftermath of the Sixties, paint a kind of road to the earthquake in Armenia, where the narrator learns again the impermanence of everything and the need to see clearly. Then, in between portraits of his mother and her peasant Armenian roots, are the memoirs of his fellow artists and about his substitute teaching in Oakland, California, and these point to the rest of the journey.