A Literary Prescription for

Living Alone

For the flat that is entirely yours, for better and for worse.

More people live alone now than at any point in history, and almost none of them were prepared for it. Some chose it, some arrived by way of a divorce or a death or a lease that ran out, and most find the same thing: a freedom nobody who has not had it can quite explain, alongside a handful of small practical awkwardnesses that nobody warns you about. The meals for one. The nobody to say the funny thing to. The restaurant table. The occasional three a.m. thought about who would notice. This page is not about loneliness, which is a different subject, and it is not about a house that has recently emptied. It is about the ordinary practice of living by yourself. These books, poems and quotes are for doing it well and, more to the point, for enjoying it: the sociology showing how ordinary it now is, the novels about people who are neither tragic nor secretly miserable, and the poets who worked out centuries ago that a small space attended to properly stops feeling small.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Four of these are people who live alone writing about it directly, including one sociologist who will reassure you with statistics and one woman who took a puppy to Nantucket to work out who she was. The novels are about the texture of it: the residential hotel, the fridge you sleep beside, the retired judge with nobody left to tell.

Going Solo

Eric Klinenberg · 2012

The sociology, and it is the fastest cure for the suspicion that there is something wrong with you. Klinenberg spent seven years on this: more people live alone now than at any point in human history, in most wealthy countries it is among the commonest household types, and the ones doing it are not, on the whole, isolated. They go out more, volunteer more and see friends more than their married counterparts. Read it once and a great deal of unearned shame falls away.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Elizabeth Taylor · 1971

Mrs Palfrey, recently widowed, moves into a residential hotel in Cromwell Road and takes up the ordinary business of filling a day: the library, the walk, the invented grandson. Taylor is unsparing about how much of solitary life is management of appearances, and unexpectedly warm about the friendship Mrs Palfrey stumbles into. Quiet, funny, and without a shred of pity, which is why people who live alone tend to love it.

Spinster

Kate Bolick · 2015

Bolick is in her late thirties, unmarried by choice and tired of being asked about it, so she goes looking for company among five women writers who arranged their lives the same way. Part memoir, part biography, and much better than the provocative title suggests. Her argument is that the question is not whether to marry but who to be, and that the literature on the second question is thinner than it should be.

Alone Time

Stephanie Rosenbloom · 2018

A travel writer spends a season in Paris, Istanbul, Florence and New York on her own and writes about the practicalities: eating alone without a book as a shield, the freedom of an unnegotiated itinerary, why solitary meals taste different. It is the most immediately useful book here, because the barrier for most people is not the evenings at home but the restaurant table, and she takes that seriously.

Old Filth

Jane Gardam · 2004

Sir Edward Feathers, a retired judge, is widowed and living alone in a Dorset house with nobody to talk to and eighty years of an unexamined life behind him. Gardam moves between the empty present and a childhood nobody in his club ever heard about. It is very funny in a dry English way and quietly devastating about the cost of a lifetime of not mentioning things.

An Unknown Woman

Alice Koller · 1982

Koller was thirty-seven, broke and had no idea who she was, so she borrowed money, took a German shepherd puppy to Nantucket in the off-season and stayed three months to find out. The result is unlike anything else on this list: unglamorous, sometimes prickly, and completely honest about the first weeks being unbearable. She coined the distinction that most of this page rests on, between being alone and being lonely.

Kitchen

Banana Yoshimoto · 1988

Mikage’s grandmother dies and she is left entirely alone, so she takes to sleeping beside the fridge because the hum of a kitchen is the only thing that comforts her. Short, strange and very tender about the domestic objects that hold a solitary person together. If the hardest part for you is the flat itself — the silence at six, the meals for one — this is the book that takes that seriously.

Poems about living alone

People who worked this out first

A Chinese official who shut his door in the third century, a woman in a London garret in 1889, and a courtier out of favour in 1588. None of them is pretending it is a second-best arrangement.

“The Valley Wind”

Lu Yün, 3rd century, translated by Arthur Waley, 1918

Living in retirement beyond the World,
Silently enjoying isolation,
I pull the rope of my door tighter
And stuff my window with roots and ferns.
My spirit is tuned to the spring-season:
At the fall of the year there is autumn in my heart.
Thus imitating cosmic changes
My cottage becomes a Universe.

Seventeen hundred years ago a Chinese official gave up his post, shut his door and discovered the thing people who live alone eventually notice: that a small space attended to properly does not feel small. The last line is the whole argument. He is not making do with less. He has simply stopped measuring the cottage against anybody else’s house.

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“A London Plane-Tree”

Amy Levy, 1889

Green is the plane-tree in the square,
The other trees are brown;
They droop and pine for country air;
The plane-tree loves the town.

Here from my garret-pane, I mark
The plane-tree bud and blow,
Shed her recuperative bark,
And spread her shade below.

Among her branches, in and out,
The city breezes play;
The dun fog wraps her round about;
Above, the smoke curls grey.

Others the country take for choice,
And hold the town in scorn;
But she has listened to the voice
On city breezes borne.

Levy lived by herself in London in the 1880s, one of the first women through Cambridge, and she wrote this from an upstairs window. The other trees pine for somewhere else. The plane-tree thrives on soot and traffic and does not apologise for it. It is a poem about flourishing in exactly the conditions everybody assumes you must be enduring.

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from “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is”

Sir Edward Dyer, 1588

My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such present joys therein I find,
That it excels all other bliss
That earth affords or grows by kind:
Though much I want which most would have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

Dyer was a courtier who spent years out of favour and had a great deal of time on his hands. The fifth line is the honest one: he does not pretend he has everything most people want. He says he lacks it and has stopped craving it, which is a different and much more achievable claim. Four hundred and forty years on it is still the best six lines about being content with your own company.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about living alone to keep

Short lines for the evenings, and for the next time somebody asks.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Virginia Woolf

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I never said “I want to be alone.” I only said “I want to be let alone.”

Greta Garbo

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I have to be alone very often. That’s how I refuel.

Audrey Hepburn

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The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

Henrik Ibsen

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The whole day is yours to arrange. You can write before anyone is awake, walk when the walking is good, eat at nine because that is when you were hungry, and not one bit of it has to be explained to anybody.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Making the days your own

A few short practices for when there is nobody else setting the pace, which is both the difficulty and the point.

Morning Yoga Nidra

Premium meditation · Georgia Clare

A slow, restorative practice for starting the day gently when there is nobody else setting its pace.

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Embracing Your True Self

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A guided practice for setting aside who you think you should be, and returning gently to the person you actually are.

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Why One Small Thing Can Change Your Day

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A short talk on how one small, deliberate thing can quietly change the shape of a whole day.

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Falling in Love Again After Heartbreak

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On loving the life you have built on your own, and why that is not something to give up when somebody wonderful arrives.

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The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

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Questions people ask

Reading for Living Alone

Where should I start?

Start with Going Solo by Eric Klinenberg, which is the sociology and the fastest way to shed the assumption that there is something wrong with you. If the practical side is the sticking point — eating out on your own, travelling on your own — Alone Time by Stephanie Rosenbloom is the one. For a novel, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is quiet, funny and entirely without pity.

Is living alone bad for you?

The research is more reassuring than the headlines. What harms people is loneliness, and living alone is not the same thing: Klinenberg’s work found that solo dwellers typically socialise more, volunteer more and see friends more often than people in couples, partly because they have to arrange it deliberately. The risk is real when living alone is combined with withdrawal, which is a different problem and worth taking seriously.

Which quotes about living alone are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “I never said ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said ‘I want to be let alone’” (Greta Garbo), “I have to be alone very often. That’s how I refuel” (Audrey Hepburn) and Virginia Woolf on money and a room of one’s own. You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

What actually makes living alone easier?

Small structural things, mostly, rather than attitude. Having something fixed in the week that requires you to be somewhere. Cooking properly for one rather than standing at the counter. Making the flat pleasant on purpose instead of treating it as temporary. And, unromantically, having one person who would notice within a day or two if you went quiet — which is worth arranging explicitly rather than assuming.

Living Alone

Prescribed reading

People who worked this out first

Quotes about living alone to keep

Making the days your own

Reading for Living Alone

Where should I start?

Is living alone bad for you?

Which quotes about living alone are worth keeping?

What actually makes living alone easier?

More prescriptions await.