Single Again

The Unexpected Joy of Being Single

Catherine Gray · 2018

Gray spent years treating single as a waiting room and then took a deliberate break from dating to find out what was actually there. She is funny and rude about the assumptions — the pitying head tilt, the seating plans, the friends who cannot help matchmaking — and good on the research showing that single people are not, on the whole, the unhappy ones. The most immediately cheering book here.

Nora Webster

Colm Tóibín · 2014

Nora is widowed in her forties in a small Irish town in the late 1960s, with four children and a great many people calling round to be kind at her. Tóibín writes the years afterwards with almost no drama: the job, the money, the record player she buys for herself, the slow reappearance of a woman who existed before the marriage. Quiet, and the finest novel there is on becoming a person again.

How to Be Single and Happy

Jennifer Taitz · 2018

A clinical psychologist on the specific thought patterns that make being single feel like a failure: the catastrophising, the comparison, the belief that a life only counts once somebody has picked you. It is proper cognitive behavioural work rather than encouragement, with exercises, and it is aimed squarely at the two in the morning version of the question rather than the dinner-party one.

Ladder of Years

Anne Tyler · 1995

Delia Grinstead, forty and comprehensively taken for granted, walks off a Delaware beach in her swimming costume and simply keeps going. She rents a room in a strange town, takes a job, and constructs a life in which nobody knows her. Tyler is neither approving nor disapproving, which is what makes it work, and the ending is more interesting than the premise leads you to expect.

Excellent Women

Barbara Pym · 1952

Mildred Lathbury is in her thirties, lives alone in a London flat, and is described by everybody as capable, which is how a woman on her own becomes the person who makes the tea at other people’s crises. Pym is very funny and slightly merciless about it. She is also warmer than her reputation suggests, and the ending grants Mildred exactly the freedom she has been quietly enjoying all along.

Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends

Bruce Fisher & Robert Alberti · 1981

The old workhorse, and still the most used book in divorce recovery groups. Fisher lays the process out as nineteen building blocks, from denial through to freedom, and the reason it endures is that it stops people assuming they are doing it wrong. Not elegant and not meant to be. Useful in the way a map is useful when you are certain you are the only person ever to have been lost here.

High Fidelity

Nick Hornby · 1995

Rob is thirty-five, has just been left, and deals with it by ranking his five worst break-ups and then tracking the women down to ask what went wrong. It is very funny and it is also the most accurate account anyone has written of a man doing the emotional work badly, in the wrong order, whilst insisting he is fine. Men are single again too, and they tend to get handed far less about it than women do. This one is honest about the sulking, the self-pity and the slow, unglamorous business of growing up a bit.