For most of us, the idea of romantic love has lost hardly any of its allure. It continues to be the focus of our collective fantasies. It is, perhaps, the most essential component of what most people understand happiness to be. But more people live alone now than at any other time in history. People like me. Many of us, willingly or not, have said goodbye to the grand idea of love. Even if some of us still believe in it.
But can you really live a good life alone, without a romantic relationship? How sustainable is a model like that? And how do you learn to live with being alone without it hurting, without lying to yourself? These were the questions that I didn’t know the answers to when I started writing my book, Alone. But I knew that I needed to find them. Some of the answers I found in literature – in a wide array of essays and novels, it turned out. This is a small selection.
1. The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
Many people find themselves in relationships that make them unhappy but are unable to end them because they’re afraid of being and staying alone. It’s a fear that our culture deeply instils in all of us, partly because there are too few books like this one. The Cost of Living, the second instalment of Levy’s Living Autobiography series, deals with what happens when life falls apart and we do not want to mend it any more. It’s a book about what comes after marriage, about breaking out of the societal roles all of us have internalised. About wanting everything from life and the harsh but worthwhile price we pay for it.
2. Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Whenever one of your friends is lovesick, give them a copy of Bluets. It’s an essay of melancholy genius. Purportedly a meditation on the colour blue, it examines the pains of pining for someone and, in the end, the subsiding of these pains. Nelson tries to find dignity in loneliness but fails, arriving instead at embracing solitude as a way of relating to and fully seeing the world. The essay is a marvel to read, again and again.
3. Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik
There are times in life we all encounter crushing loneliness, regardless of how many friends we have and whether we’re in a romantic relationship or not. One of these times comes when somebody we love dies. In her autofictional novella, Norwegian writer Ørstavik tries to come to terms with the loneliness of anticipatory grief. She has moved to Milan to be with the man she loves, only to find out he has cancer and less than a year to live. Ti amo chronicles the daily life of someone who can’t talk about what’s going on inside her to anyone. It’s a gripping book, and impossible to forget.
4. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
For anyone who wants to read and think about loneliness, this is the holy grail. Olivia Laing is such a masterful writer. Her reflections on the psychology and psychoanalysis of loneliness are as deft as they are enlightening. And her shedding light on the art and lives of queer artists such as Klaus Nomi, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, who at some point were almost forgotten, is a joy. Throughout her essays Laing makes clear that even though loneliness is debilitating and makes us feel unlike ourselves, it’s very human, too.
5. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
I personally feel that Hanya Yanagihara is our Tolstoy. In a way, all three of her novels deal with people going through their lives alone. This theme is most pronounced in A Little Life. Yanagihara rigorously examines how it is possible to lead a life shaped by trauma, and whether an almost perfect adopted family can change the daily encounters with the psychological and bodily consequences of that trauma. It’s a novel of an intensity beyond compare.
6. Look at Me by Anita Brookner
I’m not sure which of Anita Brookner’s novels I love most. They all are gorgeously written and deal with being single in a way that no novels have before or since. Brookner trains unflinching attention on the emotional vicissitudes of life in a society that gives single people the feeling they really are terrible failures. Despite its dry humour, Look at Me is a book that can break your heart. Brookner makes her readers feel well-mannered librarian Fanny’s slow-burning devastation acutely. She leaves us breathless, and a little devastated ourselves.
7. Accident: A Day’s News by Christa Wolf
Wolf is the German writer I love most. In this autofictional novel from 1987, she chronicles a day she spends by herself in a little house in the East German countryside trying to make sense of two competing events in her life: the risky brain surgery her brother undergoes that day and the nuclear meltdown in Cernobyl a few days before. It’s a difficult book at times because Wolf is grappling with something that our psyches usually don’t allow us to see: how helpless we are in the face of fateful events beyond our control, and how catastrophically we are thrown into history. Accident is so inspiring because Wolf knows that we have to deal with that fact alone – and gives us a hard-won example of how to do just that.
8. Assembly by Natasha Brown
There are different kinds of solitude and also different kinds of loneliness. One of them is what the philosopher Jill Stauffer calls “ethical loneliness”. It’s the feeling of being abandoned by the society we live in and being confronted with its unacknowledged injustices and cruelties. Brown’s minimalist novel quietly dissects what this kind of loneliness does to us. It unhurriedly evokes our long history of oppression and shows the effects it has on the assembling of our identities. It’s a haunting book that culminates in a decision you can’t get out of your head.
9. The Years by Annie Ernaux
I know, Ernaux’s masterpiece is not strictly a book about aloneness, but its rich and multi-faceted tapestry can teach us more about our solitary lives than most of the books I know. The Years is a meditation on the events of the French writer’s private life and the changing attitudes of the society during her lifetime. Uncompromisingly yet poetically, she chronicles how a society produces loneliness by excluding people because of their sex, gender identity or marriage status. It’s hard to overstate how brilliant this book is. I’m not able to do it justice. If you haven’t read it already, start now.
10. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
Due out next month, this novel follows an unnamed girl who flees from a colonial settlement in 1600s Virginia to make her way through the forests and rivers of North America. Groff turns the ideological underpinnings of classic Robinsonades deftly on their head. During her fight for survival the girl comes to an understanding of the natural world and her life within it which is a rare testament to the spiritual upsides of loneliness that we can only experience when we are alone.
• Alone by Daniel Schreiber is published by Reaktion (£14.95). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
