Briskly upbeat advice for living the single life.
Booth offers a guide to help people build fulfilling lives without a partner.
At the start of her nonfiction debut about living a secure, grounded life outside of a romantic relationship, the author nods in the direction of her book’s obvious ideological predecessor, Helen Gurley Brown’s classic Sex and the Single Girl (1962). Booth notes the prevalence of couples in society: “People in romantic relationships often seem to get a 50 percent discount in life.” And yet, this privileged status is often no great bargain for women, who, according to research, still do most of the household work of laundry, cooking, and cleaning; more than half of all marriages end in divorce, and the author wonders if partnering up is really such a wonderful deal. “Let’s be honest,” she writes, “other people can drain you of your emotional and mental energy.” Booth proceeds from this premise, armed with many stories drawn from her own dating life, to expand on the possibilities of finding another way, encouraging readers to get to know themselves, find their own fulfillment, and make a solitary home into a sanctuary. The aim is not to spurn the possibility of romantic relationships, but to keep an eye on the personal benefits of singlehood, which include “not having to have sex if you don’t feel like it” and “not having to constantly navigate another person’s negative moods.” All of this is presented in a calming, cheerful narrative voice supported by a satisfying amount of research. Booth clearly recognizes, as Brown did before her, that she’s swimming against an enormously powerful tide of cultural expectations, and she’s all the more passionately convincing for that. Her lucid discussions of the practicalities of living uncoupled will appeal to readers wondering if they can pass up that 50 percent discount.
Briskly upbeat advice for living the single life.Pub Date: July 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798999385338
Page Count: 131
Publisher: Hail Mary Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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