Alone: On Different Ways of Living

This is a memoir, a meditation on life for a single person in a couple-dominated world, the generally accepted but questionable notion that having a spouse and kids is the only path to happiness, the role of friendship, the necessity of solitude, and the importance of building a true acquaintance with oneself...

We’re living at a time when more and more people around the world, live alone, either by choice or otherwise. There are as many joys as there are difficulties in living alone, there’s certainly a lot more freedom than there would be in a traditional nuclear family set up. Yet, somehow, we persist in associating single-hood with failure and assume that a single life is necessarily a lonely one.

Schreiber writes that romantic love is the last grand narrative to have survived all the social change and shifts in perspective that we’ve experienced over the last seventy years. It’s what most people still have at the top of the list of things they need to be happy. He used to be one of them.  

But things changed, and for a variety of reasons, good and bad, he’s arrived in his forties, a single man. He writes charmingly about his day-to-day life and it’s clear that he’s created a fulfilling existence for himself. He’s happy on the whole, but sometimes, he gets lonely.

Schreiber writes movingly of his experience of loneliness, feeling it most keenly during the isolation of the pandemic, but he comes to realise that loneliness is a fundamental human experience, an existential one that we must all grapple with at one time or the other.

This is a very special book, it's beautifully written, and painfully honest. It will hurt and it will soothe, and it will leave you feeling like you're somehow better for having read it.