This does not alleviate her yearning for romantic love and being part of a couple, but her contemplations also reveal the abundance in her life, particularly her family of cats and friends, and the joy she finds in her home. Particularly poignant are Key’s musings about her close and complicated friendship with British poet and mentor, Roddy Lumsden, who passed away in 2020.

In June of this year I saw some friends for the first time in a long time, to celebrate my birthday. We sat outside my flat and a thunderstorm came in. Recognising the romantic potential of a storm, I stood out in the rain and gave myself over to what heavy rain could activate in my body. Rain so heavy it felt like being touched. Later that evening, there were just three of us left. I asked if they wanted to sing Blue with me. And we sang. Anahit Behrooz: There’s a really interesting tension in Arrangements in Blue between a yearning for romantic love and a decentring of it. Why was it so important to remain in this irreconcilable state?A unique, intimate memoir about building a beautiful life without prioritising romantic love, or focusing on received ideas of success. Guardian AB: It’s interesting the way you think about your solitude as an ability to do things. It reminds me of the subtitle of the book, ‘Notes on Love and Making a Life’ – the way love is a passive thing we wait for, but making a life requires deliberate work. I listened to the audiobook of this which is read by the author herself and I very much enjoyed it. That night Blue ignited my project of romantic love, my idea of how I would press my heart against the world. The album laid it all out for me – I’d fall in love, it would be sweet and cosy, I’d be sad, I’d sometimes need to run away. I’d hurt someone. They would hurt me. The music’s harmonic cascades, in all their sprawling highs and lows mapped the course. Above all, I’d be prepared to bleed. There is a moment in the text where Key discusses her expectations of vacationing as a twenty-something. The glamour she assumed it would bestow, transforming her into a more sophisticated, confident self. But no matter how often she traveled, or where, she always brought the self she was with her. She writes about wanting “the kind of travel I thought went hand in hand with romantic love,” which entailed “staged photos at sunset…hot tubs…to suddenly look chic in a wide-brimmed straw hat.” In other words, luxury was firmly attached to Key’s fantasies of romantic love. “I ached,” she writes, “for the status of relationship that a luxurious holiday would make obvious.” There absolutely is something inherently luxurious about romantic love. Someone outside of yourself appreciating things about you that only another person would notice. Showering you with something beyond kindness. Desiring not only sexual intimacy, but your mere proximity because it comforts them. These are all things that can turn a person into a work of art. Imagine the Mona Lisa coming to life, and holding memories in her mind of the millions who have admired her over the years. We hold ourselves differently when secure in the knowledge of being thoroughly appreciated. This is likely the reason those who are attached get chatted up more often than when they were single. They exude the confidence of the wanted.

AB: You write about aloneness as its own mode of intimacy, rather than an absence. Was that something you were consciously trying to implement?i bought this book at Shakespeare and Company, alongside “Things I Don’t Want to Know About”, by Deborah Levy — non-fiction is the genre I have been most interested in this year, and my current obsession with blue covers paved the way for this “double bill”. The “right” way to engage with romance is an idea we all carry around with us, shifting it into different shapes as new information comes to us through music, celebrity couples, films, social media, and the people we interact with from day to day. Our guardians are the first to model love for us, and our relationships with them tend to influence how we relate to others throughout our lives. Key describes how her life as one of five children in a house full of second-hand furniture to parents who did not appear to love one another planted seeds of want in her. Other relationships she witnessed, including that of her maternal grandparents, were antithetical to her parents’ in that each person had a role they seemed to relish and lived harmoniously with their partner. For the author, healthy love is, and is born of, safety. Her grandparents in particular demonstrated this. Although Key took care to create a warm home environment for herself that many friends and family members have enjoyed, what she calls her “if you build it, they will come” approach has yet to attract the right romantic partner. The unspoken expectation when reading about someone—especially a woman—who has tried in various ways to summon and cultivate romantic love in her life is that it will eventually work. There will be an afterward where we discover that learning all of these lessons lead the writer to her goal. But this is decidedly not the point of Arrangements in Blue. I did not call the Lyft driver who said he would try to connect me with Joni. I thought she’d see my deficiency too.

AK: It was almost something I was feeling my way towards. I recognised that the opportunity I’ve had for solitude is really precious. To be on your own and find distraction and pleasure and interest in your own company – for some people that feels really scary – so I really value that I can. I can go on holiday on my own, I can walk into a bar or a restaurant and eat on my own, I can have no plans on a weekend and it won’t make me feel rejected. Straddling positivity and cynicism, pride and despair, Key's artful inquiry asks us to question our focus on romantic love and consider all that remains outside of it and all that could flourish there, if we let it." — Booklist Filled with lyrical turns of phrase, this insightful take on living solo will appeal to poets, dreamers and anyone marching to the beat of their own drum. It's a lush and moving memoir. Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review* Amy Key's memoir is a exploration of love, loss, and the complexities of living without romantic love at life’s center. As a fan of Amy’s lush and evocative poetry, I eagerly anticipated her book, and it was nothing short of astonishing. Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue - which shaped Key's expectations of love - as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. 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.

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AB: I’m curious about the role shame plays in all this, and the way it shapes women’s interior lives. AB: These are incredibly vulnerable ideas, and there’s been a move towards a kind of radical honesty in such writing in recent years. It makes me think of an essay I once read about memoir, and the difference between writing your vulnerability as a window and writing it as a wound. Amy Key's extraordinary Arrangements in Blue isn't merely a commentary on Joni Mitchell's Blue, but something bolder, more personal and shape-shafting, in line with Joni's own art in that it takes no starting point for granted."

Blue is a lens through which [Mitchell] sees so many things, sees so many shades of life – her home, a lover’s name, a child’s eyes, sadness, travel, grief, sex, desire, renewal,” writes Key. Stepping outside categories such as “single” and “married”, Ky explores less easily definable kinds of love, such as the complex relationship she had with her “friend and poetry mentor” Roddy Lumsden. Their connection spanned many years, ending only when Lumsden died in 2020 due to his alcoholism. Key wonders “whether the love I had for Roddy had more significance than our definitions of love and relationships allowed”.

Joni knew about being winterised. One of the first of her songs that I loved was ‘The Gallery’ from her album Clouds. In ‘The Gallery’ she sings of how she gave a partner all her ‘pretty years’ but when their love began to fail, he left her to ‘winter’ alone. I hadn’t realised I’d winterised myself. I hadn’t realised I’d wasted so much time. I’ve been saving love for a special occasion, like a bottle of wine I’d hung onto, even though it would not age well. I’d given my pretty years to no one. It makes me think of years ago, I went to see Maggie Nelson read. And she said: ‘you have to write about what is tearing at your heart’. And I was like: ‘Okay. I’m doing it right now.’ [Laughs]. There is a part of me that believes you need that impetus. I don’t mean right in the moment of distress. But the things that are tearing at your heart are the things you are probably going to write best about. Poet Amy Key’s "dazzling" debutnon-fiction book, inspired by Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album,will be published by Jonathan Cape following a seven-way auction. AK: It’s interesting because I’m aware that lots of people will say to me: ‘If you want romantic love, you have to go out there, you can’t be passive.’ And yet, I see a lot of passive romantic love happening and passive relationships that are no longer romantic relationships, but have the status of being so. As a person who doesn’t have a partner, I do think I sometimes have to put more effort into how to shape a life around me. I have to create a definable framework of my own, because there isn’t a ready-made framework for me to create my life in. Four stars, because for all of its flaws, it's important and joyful to have this book in the world. Someone needed to write in all honesty about the wonderful and harsh experience of not having romantic love in one's life in a society that seems to value only that.