91 books like Sex and the Single Woman

This might seem like an odd choice if you’re searching for a book to cure your heartbreak—but hear me out.

I think sometimes we stay in relationships that aren’t a great fit for us entirely too long because we’re striving to have a picture-perfect life. Dr. Schafler doesn’t directly take on relationships, but she does teach you how to use your perfectionist tendencies for good, in ways that serve your life and your ambitions, instead of running your life or having you out here making terrible choices (like drunk dialing ol’dude…).

I first learned about Logan Ury listening to the podcast This is Dating. While I was waiting on the second season to drop, I learned about Dr. Ury’s book.

I’m not trying to be ageist, but it was refreshing to hear dating advice from a professional that isn’t older and hasn’t been married for decades. Ury’s dating years being more recent meant she gets the landscape modern daters are struggling to find love in. Her perspective was instantly more relevant to me.

There were also several knowledge gems that she dropped throughout her book that I’d already learned the hard way, which gave me more confidence in giving the new-to-me information she presented a shot.

I read this book in grad school while I was working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books about choosing to be child-free.

Sometimes, you just need some real talk and a reminder that the deck really is stacked against you when it comes to dating. This book helped provide some much-needed perspective so that I could understand that there’s only so much control I have over my own singleness and that there are cultural factors at play. 

A lot of people know Rachel Cargle because of her activism and her community building. But her life story shows how sometimes you have to let go of what you’ve been taught to want so you’re free to go after what you really want.

Rachel wasn’t satisfied being a well-loved, stay-at-home wife in a small Ohio town. But it was hard for her to exit her marriage because we’ve all been taught to find a good man and hang on tight. Rachel did manage to leave and step onto a radically different life path. She’s open in the book about fluidity around her sexuality and exploring non-monogamy.

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.

When I first started writing books about single life, I thought my joyful and utterly unapologetic take on it was something fresh and new. Then I discovered Marjorie Hillis’s book–first published in 1936! Full of wit and attitude, it was an instant bestseller and republished in 2008.

Hillis has no patience for people who think a single life is sad, seeing them as hopelessly behind the times. One of the single women described in the book has traveled the world and feels sorry for her married friends tethered to husbands. Hillis feels sorry for the people who have never discovered the joy of being alone, including in bed. Every chapter includes single-at-heart sentiments sure to be treasured.

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.

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.

Character transformations do it for me every time and boy, does this book deliver. Rachel escapes a religious community knowing what she wants and unafraid to go for it. She recruits Ben to take her virginity without telling him, and when he finds out, fireworks ensue. He’s initially an unworthy hero with a cynical heart, but we gradually see him become a better man with her.

Anything by Anne Calhoun delivers great steamy scenes, but in this particular book, Rachel’s discovery of sex, with Ben to teach her, is off the charts. Anne draws you in from the first word. Their undeniable chemistry is engrossing. Couple that with complex characters and a beautiful story between two very different people, and you have a barnstormer!

A roman-à-clef which is not a novel and 80% of whose keys I have unlocked. She was “Evie” and she died in Hollywood this year of complications of Huntington’s disease and probably smoking, at age 78. Our families were close and in fact the second “L.A. woman,” second that is to Eve herself, narrating and thinly disguised as Sophie Lubin, was my aunt, Marie (née) Gattman, called “Lola,” married first to photographer Hy Hirsh (“Sam Glanzrock” in the book) and second to Elwood Scott Chapman (whom Marie “named” Aaron and who is called “Luther” in the book). Eve’s writing style is contagious and its logic so twisted that it makes you say “What?” and re-read many passages. As in my book, the battle between Stalin and Trotsky hovers constantly in the background. I think Trotsky wins.