What if being single isn’t a transient state? Is a life without romantic love necessarily intolerable? These are just two of the tough, weighty questions from which Amy Key’s introspective and raw memoir unspools. Now in her mid-40s, Key hasn’t been in a romantic relationship since she was 22 and she’s seeking clues as to why she’s living with no great love, and why this doesn’t sit right with her self-image. Like Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Arrangements in Blue confronts a topic that women are expected to have one very sharp position on with the ambivalence it deserves.

One of the places Key looks for clues is Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, which she first heard when she was 14 and has been consumed by ever since. Key refers to it as her emotional inheritance – she uses it, song by song, to dissect her experience of the pleasures and pains of love, desire and sex. Her subtitle, ‘Notes on Love and Making a Life’ is crucial. If society says that romantic love bestows certain markers of success, such as creating a home of one’s own or being able to care for a partner or child, Key wonders if a person can achieve these milestones alone. Arrangements in Blue thoughtfully considers how we might make a good life without expecting romantic love to provide everything worth living for.

Importantly, Key’s book isn’t seeking a solution to the question, ‘Why am I single?’ (although she admits to asking it often) or in unambiguously celebrating solo living. She finds the pleasures in it, but also the challenges. There’s courage here. It takes real guts to publicly exorcise the contours of your own heart and mind in such frank ways, and Key does it with a poet’s skill; her writing is piercing and gorgeous.

But what I think makes this memoir truly impressive is that Key doesn’t shy away from the dark stuff – the twisty unruliness of loneliness, humiliation, envy and self-loathing. Her fearless willingness to see her story from both sides renders it a very human one. There are no easy answers and so there are many shades of blue here – joyful, uniting and provocative, and all of them beautiful and true.