Books like Live Alone and Like It

In Tana French’s brilliant crime novel, a single woman and a single man are detectives who are passionate about the work they do together investigating murders. Their banter is adorned with astute and irreverent commentaries on the ways in which couples flaunt their coupledom and expect single people to stay in their place. 

The detectives’ relationship is complex, real, and deep. It is a friendship, and in a true tribute to friendship, it does not morph into romance.

For years, I read memoirs by single women in search of people who would joyfully and unapologetically own their single lives. I found several who were insightful and engaging but ultimately disappointing. Typically, they hedged–sure, they would say, they were fine with being single, but they were not about to commit to staying single. Some were gobsmacked to discover that single life could be fulfilling as if that were the most amazing thing imaginable.

Then, Keturah Kendrick published this book. Kendrick knew who she was from an early age. She owns her singlehood and all her other choices about how to live her life, such as not having children. She brilliantly shatters stereotypes about single people, and her critiques of popular culture are skillful and searing.

Much to my surprise and delight, Jhumpa Lahiri’s story collection captures the powerful appeal of freedom and solitude, even for people who are not single at heart. In A Choice of Accommodations, a man who was married with children confided that the moments of his life he savored the most were those he had to himself.

In Going Ashore, a woman in Rome, away from her fiancé in the US, experienced deep fulfillment in spending her days on her own. In the title story, Unaccustomed Earth, a widower from India on his way to stay with his daughter and her family in the US, is not happy to leave behind the freedom and peacefulness of his single life to become part of a family again. 

The stars of this book are “solitaries,” people who choose to live alone or spend substantial stretches of time alone. Upending the demeaning caricatures of people who spend a lot of time alone, Johson shows that some of the most renowned artists and authors have been solitaries.

They have rich inner lives and contribute meaningfully to society. Even unknown solitaries are artists–they design their own lives. Solitaries value friendship and do not see romantic relationships as sitting atop a relationship hierarchy. Free of a conventional focus on The One, they are more open to more different people and the world.

I’d never read any PG Wodehouse before I found this in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. My edition is a huge and ancient green volume that looks like a book of magic – and it is.

It contains all the Jeeves and Wooster stories from the very beginning till the end of their golden age. And they’re in order, so you see the characters and style develop, and watch Bertie follow PG himself to America and back.

It came to me just when I needed it most: I had an absolutely horrible job at the time, the sort where you start dreading Monday morning around about lunchtime on Saturday. Being able to slip away into these stories was like owning a portal to a better world. They contain so many pleasures.

For one thing, PG can construct a sentence that somehow transcends its constituent words to become almost… show more.

I contributed an essay to this collection and there’s quite a few writers I admire in this book, as well.

It’s refreshing to see other people’s perspective on what can feel like an albatross around your neck. Some of the essays are humorous, others are more poignant, but they all work together to show that a single life can look and feel a bazillion different ways—yours will be what you make it.

Szalay sort of exposes—in the most subtle of ironic ways—how men delude themselves with respect to their intentions, their character, their attitudes towards work and women, and all the concomitant notions of competition contained therein.

He's got, it seems to me, a quite Hobbesian worldview going—and that, to me, is refreshing! Of course the writing is for the most part beautiful; but not too beautiful, not too embellished. A bit plangent. A bit lapidary.

One thing I would say is, reading him, I am sometimes tempted to cut the last sentence of his chapters. He often ends with a note, as it were, that strikes me as bathetic. I wonder if in some way he doesn't trust the reader. 

Cutting the last sentence: that's an old New Yorker magazine trick and I think—even though this may sound presumptuous—his prose'd benefit… show more.

I was put off by the title of this book because of the name, Morrow Little. I mean, who has a name like that? Plus, I wasn’t a fan of stories set in the 1700s American frontier. But a friend insisted I read it, and yeah, my friend knew me well. I wanted to run away with this hero, but no spoilers here. Morrow Little embodies every woman looking for honest love and she has the courage to pursue it. Or follow it. You be the judge. Because of this story, I’ve read every other Laura Frantz book I could find. She has a way of capturing the setting and atmosphere and dropping you right in the middle of it.

I’ve selected this title as it’s one of the first Jeeves and Wooster books but, to be honest, you could choose any one; they’re all brilliant.

That goes for pretty much all of Wodehouse’s stories. I realise everyone knows these two characters from the various TV series produced over the years. But they may not have read the books. They should. It’s a great credit to the author that whichever actors portray this pair, and others such as Lord Emsworth of Blandings, the characters are instantly recognisable.

I think PG Wodehouse’s characterisation is superb. I admire his eye for details, not only in appearance but in mannerisms and speech. Wooster – the young gentleman – is wealthy, foppish, dapper, scatterbrained and idle. Jeeves – the gentleman’s gentleman – is someone who “from the collar upwards, stands alone.” That phrase alone tells the reader everything they need to know about the… show more.

If Jane Austen was writing in the twentieth century, she’d be Barbara Pym!

There is so much sly, gentle humour in this story of a respectable thirty-something vicar’s daughter living in London in the fifties. Her life revolves around her church and work, and when a glamorous married couple moves into the flat upstairs, everything changes.

I’ve read this book so many times, and it has never failed to delight me. Great characterisation, a narrative that moves along at a cracking pace, and several potential suitors for the protagonist’s hand. Also, the book contains some of my favourite jokes around bird poo, fawn underwear, and badly made tea. Even though I’ve read and reread it, I always hate to get to the last chapter and finish it again.