In her honest and luminously crafted memoir, poet Amy Key uses Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue as her guide in navigating experiences of loneliness, desire, diappointment and romantic love.
When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love.
Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - an album that shaped Key's expectations of love - as her guide, she examines the unexpected life she has created for herself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed.
With profound candour and intimacy, Arrangements in Blue explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a singular work - a beautifully-written and essential book about building a life on your own terms, which inspires us to live and love more honestly.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781787333895
Number of pages: 240
Weight: 361 g
Dimensions: 222 x 144 x 25 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
The book I've been waiting for my entire life. Utterly beautiful and funny and true. - Dolly Alderton, author of Everything I Know About Love
Marks an important shift in ideas about intimacy and solitude. - Observer
A beautiful, painful, liberating book. Amy Key writes with such tenderness and insight. - Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
This raw, gorgeous, pulsing memoir the harbinger of a real talent. - Sunday Times
Fearless... Wonderfully, Key's prose retains all the intimacy of her verse. Arrangements in Blue is a tender, subversive study of love in its myriad forms. - New Statesman
A startlingly honest account of long-term singledom hits a courageous sweet spot, tackling the issue with heart… Her singular voice on this (almost) taboo subject is to be celebrated. - Sunday Times, Books of the Year*
Amy Key writes with rare integrity, courage and style... A beautiful and necessary book. - Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent
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
Arrangements in Blue is a short read, but each page feels so full and worth savouring. - Guardian
Arrangements in Blue took my breath away... Even in the process of reading it for the first time I knew it would be a book I would return to again and again. - Sophie Mackintosh, author of Blue Ticket
