Single, Not Alone

This is the book I needed at forty-one and could not find on the shelf.

In October 2019, after years of small, filed-away signs, Carolyn Strain asked her husband to leave. She had spent thirteen years watching the marriage become smaller than the woman she actually was.

Single, Not Alone is the story of what came next. The two words she had been swallowing for years. The dating apps, and the outdoorsman in the White Mountains who walked her back into her body. The in-laws who had become her real family and were no longer hers. The beauty and wellness economy she half-believed in, until she didn't. The women who stayed, whose phones were already in their hands. And the lyrics she finally wrote for herself.

She refused the ending she had been handed. The grief she was supposed to carry forever. The second husband who repairs the first one. The safe landing in a smaller life. She lived a different one.

Single, Not Alone is a configuration of a life, not an in-between.

For readers of Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Lyz Lenz's This American Ex-Wife.