Self Contained

Scenes from a Single Life

By: Emma John

Narrated by: Emma John

Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

There is a piece of cod-wisdom regularly dispensed to single women: romance will arrive when you least expect it. I had assumed it would also make its own travel arrangements, too.

Emma John is in her 40s; she is neither married, nor partnered, with child or planning to be.

In her hilarious and unflinching memoir, Self-Contained, she asks why the world only views a woman as complete when she is no longer a single figure and addresses what it means to be alone when everyone else isn't.

In her book, she captures what it is to be single in your 40s, from sharing a twin room with someone you've never met on a group holiday (because the couples have all the doubles with ensuite), to coming to the realisation that maybe your singleness isn't a temporary arrangement, that maybe you aren't pre-married at all and, in fact, you are self-contained.

The book is an exploration of being lifelong single and what happens if you don't meet the right person, don't settle down with the wrong person and realise the biggest commitment is to yourself.

©2021 Emma John (P)2021 Octopus Publishing Group

singletonness explained

as a single woman, everything in context was spot on. This is a detailed explanation as to what being a single female in current society is like, and highly accurate. I do wish every smug married person would listen/read this, as u might learn to understand the awful assumptions u make. But you do need to be smart enough to listen to the underlying morale within each story, which i think is most of the problems readers with less ranked stars have. That said, what I did not like was lack of transitions between chapters, it was difficult to figure out what point she was even trying to make until you got to the end of the chapter. The other negative is the way extroverts tend to assume everyone is as well, and the endless parade of friend's names that i don't care about but was somehow supposed to remember their significance. end result= content 5 stars; editing = 1 star.