From grief to anger to full-throttled joy, Amy Key hits every note of feeling with perfect pitch... A brave and brilliant exploration of how one woman lives both alone and alongside romance. An absolutely gorgeous work. Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book

The chapters in which she confronts the peculiarities of being single head on are the best: the desire for a child, the desire for romantic love, the role and value of friendships, all the love with nowhere to go in a society that recognizes only romantic love as real and worthy. There are a few more tangential chapters: making a home and going on holiday might be different when undertaken alone, but are not central to the experience of being single to me (anymore). As a result, it feels like she's sometimes too hung up on her status as a single woman, as if every single aspect of life revolves around relationship status. It doesn't and it shouldn't, but I can imagine it feels like that for some people or sometimes. Amy Key's extraordinary Arrangements in Blue isn't merely a commentary on Joni Mitchell's Blue, but something bolder, more personal and shape-shafting, in line with Joni's own art in that it takes no starting point for granted."The night my friend Roddy died, I was with my friends Amy and Bryony. We were watching videos of Canadian figure skaters Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir. One in particular, their final (gold medal winning) Olympic performance, beguiled us. It led to a conversation – a game almost – about what music we would each skate to for our ‘short’ and ‘long’ programmes. My friend Amy knew immediately: she would skate to ‘Video Games’ by Lana Del Rey for her short programme, and then ‘Permafrost’ by Magazine for her long programme. We were drinking and got distracted by another line of conversation before Bryony and I gave thought to our own answers. When I am cooking, I sing a line from Joni’s ‘My Old Man’ to myself, ‘the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide’. That’s what the couple sharing the pillow brought to mind: they seemed like the kind of couple who’d never spent a night apart. I love my empty bed; it never feels too big for me. And I’ve slept alone for so many years that I find it hard to share a bed these days. The frying pan on the other hand. The frying pan has an altogether different intimate energy. Perhaps it’s because people so often fry eggs for someone they love. And to eat eggs together suggests a synchronised hunger, suggests sleeping and waking together, and says please linger, please stay. Perhaps it’s the sweet balance of ‘you cook and I’ll wash up’, how the pan moves from one person’s job to another, and the ordinariness of that joint endeavour. I wasn’t in LA because of Joni Mitchell, but that was what I had told my Lyft driver and it felt good to have a story. Amy Key writes with rare integrity, courage and style... A beautiful and necessary book. Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent Amy Key—a writer "of rare and strange magic" ( Guardian)—probes the art of living without romance in this soul-stirring debut.

Combines memoir with gentle manifesto, investigating our cultural obsession with coupledom... It transforms the hyper-personal into a tender, universal portrait of fashioning a life on your own terms. i I know I can fully experience platonic love. And I have sustained myself this long with an emotional resourcefulness perhaps people with romantic partners don’t have the opportunity to develop. I’ve had the space to notice and celebrate loving actions and interactions – how floating in salt water gives me the bodily abandon of sex, a friend who reaches out to hold my hand because they are glad to be with me, my cat settling on my hip for mutual warmth, my cat seemingly sensing when I have a nervy heart, remembering an apricot sky seen alone is no less magic for being seen alone. A letting go of the givers of crumbs. What makes “Arrangements in Blue” so powerful is Key's vulnerability and candidness. She explores themes of loneliness, desire, jealousy, regret, friendship, and self-realization with rare integrity and courage. key's prose is luminous and poetic throughout the book, but it particularly shines in the later chapters. i loved the "crazy" chapter detailing her experiences with men which lasted months and years but never fell under the placeholder of "partner/boyfriend" and found it very relatable. key's candour about these relationships (because yes! you are allowed to call them relationships) is so refreshing - i often feel women are pressured into diminishing the impact of the people who treat us badly, especially if this happens outside the limits of a clearly defined romantic partnership. her description of caring for her friend and mentor roddy lumsden through his illness and eventually mourning him after his death is painfully honest but shot through with such tenderness that i nearly cried listening to it. and the final chapter is a beautiful end to the book, with such warm and hopeful reflections on human connection and care outside and within romantic love.As it looks at our ideas about starting a family, making a home and even going on holiday, Key’s writing makes clear how pervasive the presumption of coupledom still is. “Nothing has displaced romantic love from its holy status,” she writes, noting the attendant rituals, milestones and material markers – wedding rings and registries, due dates, anniversaries and date nights – that hover out of reach for single people. 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. Like the beloved songs and poems that pepper it, Arrangements in Blue transforms the hyper-personal into a tender, universal portrait of fashioning a life on your own terms.