Single, Not Alone

Single, Not Alone is a memoir of what happens to a woman when the marriage ends and she refuses the story she was handed.

Carolyn Strain walked out of a marriage of thirteen years and into a life without a script. She went looking for the book that spoke to what came next. Not the tidy recovery narrative. Not the second-husband story. The honest account of a woman who discovers that single is not alone, but a configuration of a life.

For the next seven years, she practiced paying attention. To her own current. To the forty-eight White Mountain peaks she climbed one at a time. To the language handed to women in her situation. And to the love that arrived: the four women who did not leave, the man who reminded her what being chosen feels like, and the one who showed her with his hands that the body and the heart live in the same room.

The woman who began this story stood at a mirror in Ireland fixing her lipstick for a dinner in a marriage she was already leaving. The woman who finished it writes from a kitchen in Pennsylvania, in a version of her life no one, including her, saw coming.

For readers of Vivian Gornick's The Odd Woman and the City, Rachel Cusk's Aftermath, and Maggie O'Farrell's I Am, I Am, I Am.