Book Review: How to be Single

When I first spotted How To Be Single on the bookshelf, I thought to myself: I should read that. You know, to make sure I'm doing it right. But HTBS is not a how-to book, it's a novel about a woman writing a how-to book. Written by Liz Tuccillo, who co-wrote one of our favorites, He's Just Not That Into You (which I'll be reviewing soon), the story starts out by introducing the reader to a single, 38-year old New Yorker and her four friends. One of the friends is on the rebound after her husband left her for a much younger samba instructor, another can't get herself out of bed because her cat just died (three months ago), one hasn't had sex in several years and decides to take a vow of celibacy in search of spiritual enlightenment, and the other quit her job as a lawyer so she can search for Mr. Right full-time. All this prompts the main character to take off on a trip around the world, trying to figure out if other cultures know how to be single better than we do.

The book got off to an excellent start, full of great pearls of wisdom. If I hadn't been reading a borrowed copy, I probably would have highlighted a few passages, but here are a few examples:

• In the good old days, online dating was considered a hideous embarrassment, something that no one would be caught dead admitting to... Now the reaction you will get from people when they hear that you're single and not doing some form of online dating is that you must not really want it that bad. It has become the bottom line, the litmus test for how much you're willing to do for love... If you're not willing to spend the 1,500 hours, 39 coffees, 47 dinners, and 432 drinks to meet him, then you just don't want to meet him badly enough and you deserve to grow old and die alone.
• I don't think you can ever just sit back and let love just find you. Love isn't that clever.
• ...a big part of being single. Hope. Friends. And making sure you get out of your damn apartment.

But this is not a book that will actually teach you how to be single, and at the two-thirds point through the end, actually gets a bit depressing. Despite the author's tendency to start sentences with "so," I would recommend it. Just don't expect to find a life map for how to be single.