An Excerpt
“The thing with chickadees is that they stay through New England winters, when many other songbirds have gone south. They cache food in a thousand small hiding places and remember every one, and when spring finally arrives they are already here, because they were never anywhere else.”— from Single, Not Alone
About the Book
In Ireland, a woman stands at a mirror fixing her lipstick for dinner in a marriage she is already leaving. What she cannot see is how much she still wants for her life, or where those desires might take her.
After twelve years, Carolyn Strain leaves her marriage to find a life where she doesn’t have to disappear.
In Single, Not Alone, she refuses the script she’s handed for what comes next. Not the tidy recovery narrative. Not the search for a second husband.
She has never lived this way before.
What will she find on the forty-eight White Mountain peaks she climbs one at a time? Who remains when the old life collapses? What is the difference between single and alone?
For readers of Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, Single, Not Alone asks what a woman can make of her life when she no longer knows what happens next.