A couple of years ago, I tried to create a playlist of songs for those who were, like me, long-term single. The result was not as uplifting as I’d hoped. It kicked off with a couple of bangers – You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes, Independent Women Part 1 by Destiny’s Child – but quickly got a bit too real. Goodbye to Love by the Carpenters. Somebody to Love by Queen. I gave up the attempt when I found myself weeping along to George Gershwin’s But Not for Me.
As melancholic as those tracks were, I never got as far as plundering Joni Mitchell’s oeuvre. After all, Joni’s art is scored to the bone with the pleasure and pain of romantic relationships. Her 1971 masterpiece, Blue, fairly groans with love and the heartaches it has wrought. The real-life affairs enshrined within its 36-minute playtime are well documented, from the two-year relationship with “My Old Man” Graham Nash to the soulful connection with James Taylor that gave Joni her title track. Blue may be one of the greatest singer-songwriter albums of all time, but it’s not an obvious soundtrack for stubborn, unshifting singlehood.
Until now, anyway. For British poet Amy Key – as for many before her – the record became a lifelong obsession, and a benchmark against which she measured her feelings. Looking back on early crushes in her new memoir, Arrangements in Blue, she asks herself: “Was this a love so strong I couldn’t numb it out of myself with wine? Did it have the endurance of a northern star?”
Key last had a boyfriend when she was 22 years old; today she is 44. There have been encounters – brief liaisons, unrequited passions, even a distressing affair with someone else’s husband – but nothing has stuck. She is on a lonely road and she is travelling. After two collections of poetry, Luxe (2013) and Isn’t Forever (2018), her nonfiction debut is a courageously honest meditation on her partnerless life, and her inward and outward search for all the things a soulmate was supposed to deliver.
Mitchell’s music underscores the narrative, which grew out of a 2020 essay for Granta, and the chapters follow Blue’s tracklist order, each set of lyrics providing a harmonic resonance with Key’s own prose. There’s more than a wisp of the musician’s influence in her imagery as when she discovers, in her teenage diary, boys strung so closely together “it was like they were cigarettes I lit from the end of the one I was smoking”. She is, too, an acute observer of the intimacies she sees in her friends’ situations and wishes for herself – “the sweet balance of ‘you cook and I’ll wash up’, how the pan moves from one person’s job to another”.
As the book progresses, it becomes clear that Key’s deeply introspective quest is not just a hunt for what’s missing, but for what she has overlooked. As she rightly points out, while society has opened itself up to “endless variations of romantic and sexual identity”, it still privileges romance above every other form of human love. Our traditional milestones, from marriage to parenthood, are all associated with it. Those of us who have yet to find our person are seemingly abandoned to “infernal adolescence” – house-sharing with strangers, assigned the air mattress on holiday – or, in Key’s case, an “almost household” of beloved objects and cats that stand in for the usual signifiers of adulthood.
We are sold singleness as a temporary, limbo state. For those for whom it lasts, an accommodation must be reached with the stigma, the sense of failure, the grief for a life not lived. There is plenty of catharsis in Key’s language, but there is celebration in her discoveries also. Some of her most beautiful writing is about the sea, “its mineral lucidity and its mood-sharpening stinks”, its “drama of obliterating coastal light, yellow-plastic sunshine, mists and gloom”. Swimming has become an act of intimacy for her, the seawater a surrogate lover that can bear her weight and bring her back to herself. She sounds the depths, too, of her great platonic loves, like her poetry teacher Roddy Lumsden, whose death in 2020 she is still grieving.
For all its literary distinctiveness, Arrangements in Blue joins a wider investigation of singleness that has been blooming in recent years, with lockdown providing a catalyst for a more honest discussion of lives lived alone. The previous welter of witty, relatable memoirs of 21st-century womanhood – narratives that skewered the awkwardness of modern dating, celebrated the power of the sisterhood and exposed the patriarchal and biological frameworks imposed on a woman’s life story – usually ended with their protagonist finding love anyway. And while singleness may have been a good starting point for a book, no publisher saw it as an appropriate ending (when pitching my nonfiction book about learning bluegrass in the Appalachian mountains, a US agent told me it would only sell if I could guarantee that I’d fall in love while I was out there).
But something has shifted. In She I Dare Not Name, Donna Ward recounts her battle with solitude after six decades of spinsterhood; Aimée Lutkin’s The Lonely Hunter confronts the lonesomeness of singledom in the digital age. Key asks herself what is wrong with her so often it feels as mundane as asking what’s for tea; she also senses “I’m not the only one feeling this way”. That’s no wonder: the number of women who reach the age of 40 without ever having married is rising year on year.
Having written of my own experiences of reaching middle age without a partner, it’s no surprise to me that women have long shied from this exposing topic. The fear of seeming pitiable, or worse, self-pitying, keeps us quiet; the belief that no one else is quite as hopelessly single as we are keeps us alone.
But as Key’s book demonstrates, there should be no shame in desiring intimacy, or seeking it outside the confines of romance. And those of us who experience long-term singleness need a broader emotional palette than blue.
Emma John is the author of Self Contained: Scenes from a Single Life (Octopus)
• Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life by Amy Key is published by Vintage (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
