60 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.

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’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.

I was so moved when I read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne that it inspired me to write my novel with my protagonist Laurence J Benbo as a male equivalent of Judith Hearne, an innocent exploited by an uncaring world. The quotidian details of Judith’s life are delineated brilliantly by Moore in all her wretchedness reminiscent of some of the characters in Joyce’s Dubliners which Moore would have read and which possibly influenced him. The dark surroundings of Judith’s life lead her into a fantasy world aided by her one necessary weakness—alcohol. But, as Moore points out, it doesn’t have to end tragically. There is a glimmer of hope with life going on, but nothing as before.

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.

Someone call the police, because Heisey has broken into my brain, looked around, and written a story containing every thought I’ve ever had.

There’s nothing quite like feeling seen on the page to make you feel less alone as you flounder, break down, circle the drain, and look down the barrel of total oblivion, and it’s a rare privilege to find a story that does all of this with wit and warmth.

The term “sad girl lit” gets thrown around a lot, and while no one could accuse protagonist Maggie of being happy (or content, or even stable), Heisey resists the sinkhole of self-pity and exhausting melancholy that so often turns books in this niche into a chore.

Self-destructive yet self-aware women who make all the worst decisions and come to their own rescue – unite!