Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms

Journalist Slawson, author of The Single Supplement newsletter, challenges the dominant narrative of the unhappy single person with this book’s stories of unpartnered people living independent and authentic lives. She spends equal time examining big-picture ways in which single people are often rendered invisible in society and the smaller moments of awkwardness and discomfort. The book offers a deeply personal approach to daily feelings, whether of pain or joy and sometimes the strange commingling of them (e.g., feeling ashamed of enjoying singleness when friends or family members view it as a problem to be solved). The stories assembled here, often framed with quotations from luminaries like bell hooks and interspersed with statistics about singlehood, show the danger of using an overly simplified narrative to define a multitude of identities and experiences.