One's Company: Reflections On Living Alone
With pizzazz and bracing honesty, Barbara Holland, author ofEndangered Pleasures,guides us through the exiguous terrain of living alone. She hasn’t missed a thing — from the pifþing tragicomedies of the everyday angsts (“Preheating an oven and making it work for an hour just for our own personal dinner seems, well, disproportionate”) to the eerie and fragile anarchy of it all (“There’s a danger, in certain moods and at certain times of year, of simply blowing off the face of the world like a scrap of crumpled paper”). Holland gives voice to the “uncoupled” state with elegance, perspicuity, and spunk. What she is ultimately writing about, however, and what a reader responds to whether living single or surrounded by family, is the unending, unavoidable challenge of inventing one’s self, of our common need to “Þnd some grace and pleasure in our condition.”