“Loneliness is treated like the ultimate taboo; at the same time, it’s regarded as a trifle. That to be a thirty-seven-year-old who has spent a decade without someone to hold her hand at the doctor’s office is akin to being a thirteen-year-old sighing over a boy band.

Again, I know—‘single’ is not a synonym for ‘lonely.’ I know there are many lonely married people, as well as lots of single people who have a rich network of deep social connections—friends, sisters, daughters, nephews, etc.—whose lives are as far from Heller’s unhappy narrator as can be.

But for many of us, living alone in a society that is so rigorously constructed around couples and nuclear families is hard on the soul.”