No One Tells You This: A Memoir

I'm really not sure how I feel about this one. There are some passages where the author articulates some of my feelings or experiences right on, better than any explanations I've read or thought myself. But if I'm looking for assurance about my own life, this is not it. MacNicol's experiences as a single person are not my own. She's got a significant and intense network of very close friends and allies, she's living her dream in New York and jetsetting on some pretty amazing adventures. So while I relate to her acknowledgement of happily living an alternate life that women are not brought up to imagine as an option (ie, being satisfied as a single and not a failure simply because she is not married and/or have kids), I can't connect to show more her on many other levels. This story is as much about a woman dealing with her mother's decline of Parkinson's and dementia as much as accepting singlehood, about embracing the freedom to have adventures as much as accepting the children in her life belong to her friends and sister. This is not the book I thought it was going to be, or needed. show less

Some nice reflections on being 40 and single, living a life with no prebuilt instructions or expectations. It's particularly fascinating how friends of hers that were married and/or had kids frequently told her they were jealous of her. People think marriage/kids/careers will fix something in them, or will create a great future somewhere down the road. But ultimately, we only and always live in the present.

On the other hand with this book, the author is a transplant New Yorker who believes it is the center of the world, and it felt a little condescending.

Okay I think I need to give up on reading books by single women as apparently I’m an alien to the group as a whole. Are there any that just live and do their thing and don’t live in a huge city and live it up and date all the time until they feel it’s finally okay to say they’re fine with being alone? I should be the most empathetic reader here yet only felt for the author’s ordeal with her mother’s disease and early death.

This memoir of a woman writing about her life without children and partner was in many ways super relatable to me, but it felt like it was missing some kind of introspection necessary to make it a cohesive whole.