Dress up for dinner, she says – or don’t, if you want to wear your pyjamas. You will, however, find plenty of other advice. Among its pages, you won’t find any dreary recipes for one though she rightly regards corned beef hash as a very fine thing indeed, she would rather leave that sort of stuff to stodgier, less inspiriting writers than herself. But it’s the chapter about eating alone I like best. Hillis covers everything: soft furnishings, what to keep on your drinks trolley, the matter of boyfriends and whether they should stay or go. It’s one of those books that, in certain moods, works on you like a really good cocktail or a blast of exactly the right music: an antidote, if not to despair, then to the existential angst that dogs us all every now and again. I don’t live alone, but I look at it quite often. Written by Marjorie Hillis, an editor at American Vogue, and a bestseller in its time, it was aimed at a new generation of women who, whether by design or default, suddenly found themselves living the single life in tiny flats and rooms in cities in both the US and Britain. Live Alone and Like It: The Art of Solitary Refinementis a cheery little volume that was first published in 1936, and remains in print today.
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