The book also talks about realizing your own friendship boundaries: no one has to be friends with people who harm or hurt them repeatedly. Nor do you have to be friends with people who are also friends with people who are mean to you. Some people you’ve known forever may grow into ways of being that aren’t compatible with your own – and all of that is normal and it’s okay to walk away. It’s hard, but it is okay. Honest, hilarious, and deeply intimate. How to Be Alone is a profound first book from a truly talented writer.”— Bustle

The New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head offers practical solutions for creating true community, the kind that's crucial to our mental and spiritual health. Here are some steps to finding those people who will love, support, challenge, and accept you: 1. Do what you like to do.

If you’re on social media or in any groups online, odds are you have someone who always replies to you, sends you messages, or likes all your posts. These are a lot of subtle interactions that could easily turn into “dude, we should be friends maybe?” messages. So why not try? It doesn’t matter if you do it for work or do it for play, but do what you like to do. Sports, hobbies, hiking alone, travel, reading, collecting cigars, whatever it is, do it. You don’t even have to be super passionate about it, but if you enjoy it, do it. For probably over thirty years—since I was old enough to know I needed them—I’ve been looking for my people.

From Lane Moore, the critically acclaimed author of How to Be Alon e, comes a searingly intimate yet wildly funny exploration of the frustrating, messy, and, at times, deeply joyful experience of learning how to make meaningful friendships as an adult. How to Be Alone is the book I wish I had read in my early twenties. I truly believe it would have saved me a world of pain. The moment I met her I felt like I had known her my entire life. This book will make everyone smart enough to read it feel the same exact way.”— Laura Benanti, Tony Award-winning actress And: It’s Okay to Have Needs. “It’s ok to need and want things from your friends,” is a common refrain, one that I appreciated.Moore's previous book, How To Be Alone, sounds like a self-help, but is actually a memoir about growing up without family, connections, and the difficulties of that. I got it on a whim and was blindsided by how much I loved it. This one, though, is titled as a self help, but it actually IS a self-help. And I don't think that's a great thing. Might lead to a lot of confusion and disappointment from previous readers.

I felt like the references to Rwanda and other village communities and their “relationally saner” way of life were romanticized and a stretch of reality. Perhaps I read too far into this, but I felt that this argument carried the assumption that people in village cultures face no or very little relational strife. There are certainly things we can learn from village communities, but I do not believe her explanations did justice to the very real and hard challenges people face in these cultures.It’s not that there was anything wrong with my family or my school or the few friends I had, or my neighborhood—not at all. We all had our ups and downs, but we moved on and through it and had good times and bad. But I just felt a deep sense that the people around me were aliens. Or I was.