how to be single by liz tuccillo (2008)

Liz Tuccillo’s “How to be Single” immediately strikes one as unoriginal.

We hear Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City’s (SATC) voice all throughout the narration which is easily explainable as Tucillo is the executive story editor of SATC. We see the four SATC girls in "How to be Single's" four main characters. When Julie, the narrator in the book, embarks on a hop-on-hop-off journey around the world in search of answers to her questions, we are reminded of Elizabeth Gilbert in her Eat, Pray, Love.

“How to be Single” is the story of Julie, a 38 year-old publicist who detests her job and is in a mission to find out what causes singlehood and how to cope with it. It is the also the story of her four friends, Georgia, Serena, Ruby, and Alice who are all in their late 30s and looking for The One who can make them happy, fulfilled, and complete. Georgia is recently divorced with two kids; Serena, a student of Hinduism, is a vegetarian chef for a New York celebrity family; Ruby, is a serially depressed person who has problems getting over relationships whether with people or with pets; and Alice, an ass-kicker legal aid attorney who said goodbye to the poor and oppressed after her boyfriend of five years decided to move on – without her.

Julie goes to France, Italy, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia, China, India, and Iceland in search of answers to her questions. Here’s basically what she came up with:
1. Make sure you have friends.
2. Don’t be crazy, no matter how you feel, because it just makes us all look bad.
3. Decide what you believe in and then behave accordingly.
4. Get carried away.
5. Figure out the whole sex thing –when you want it, how to get it, who to do it with.
6. Make peace with the statistics because there really isn’t anything we can do about them.
7. Admit that sometimes you feel a bit desperate.
8. There’s really so few people who have it all so try not to bother with that whole envy thing.
9. Not to put pressure on you, but start to think about the whole motherhood thing.
10. Remember that sometimes there are more important things than you and your lousy love life and get your friends more involved in helping you with your lousy love life.
11. Believe in miracles.

A big weakness of the book is Tuccillo’s use of clichés to drive home her point – poverty in India, somebody dying in a perfect family, and the suave, rich, and very much married Frenchman.

If there’s one thing Tuccillo has succeeded in “How to be Single”, it is in making singlehood sound like a dreaded disease which you need to quickly get a remedy for; and if you can no longer do anything about it, how best to live with it.

This is sad. For all the avowed “research” that went into this book, all it has been able to do was parade, from all over the globe, single women who live unproductive lives doing anything and everything to be able to find the other half that will supposedly make them whole. They are all in some suspended state waiting for the big bang. Which is really not the case.

Here’s my two cents worth: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. But in whichever side of the fence that we are in, let us remember that the world is so much bigger than our own little selves and our own petty concerns. We don’t need the elves of Iceland to tell us that.