A few weeks ago the gorgeous folks at Vice Versa Press sent me a copy of their zine The Guide to Being Alone to review.  As I recently became single for the first time in a decade, you can imagine how eager I was to get my mitts on this zine.

The Guide to Being Alone is a quirky zine about living the solo life.  It is 18-pages of awesome illustrations, collages and fabulous advice on enjoying your own company.

The zine covers a range of topics including travelling alone, dealing with your new single status, making new friends, embarking on a solo night out and managing the feeling that everyone sucks.

I really enjoyed reading this zine.  Over the past few months, I’ve read quite a few books, e-guides and blog posts about living on your own and relishing the single life.  I was excited to discover that this humble little zine actually contained some fresh new advice that I hadn’t read before.  As it’s a zine and not a book, each topic is covered in broad-brush fashion, and the advice isn’t as in-depth as you would get in a book.  The result is a distilling of the best-of-the -best advice, and every line is golden.  I found so much helpful advice between it’s gorgeous pages.

The illustrations and photo collages, combined with the conversational hand-written prose give you the feeling that you’re taking a peek into your best-friend’s journal.  It’s a frank and personal account of what it’s like to be on your own,  whether at home or out in public.  The zine also uses humour to lighten up difficult topics, such as malaise and depression.

I particularly loved the chapter that talked about the realization that everyone sucks.  I have days where I hate the world more often than I’d care to admit, and this chapter discussed those feelings so perfectly and offered very sound, practical advice for dealing with those dark days.  I can tell that I’m going to refer back to this chapter time and time again.

Another fantastic thing about this zine is that it came with a fabulous soundtrack.  There are nine tracks on this disc, each one carefully selected to correspond to a certain chapter in the zine.  I thought that this was an awesome touch and really brought an extra dimension to the media.

This zine would be a fantastic gift for a quirky-alone friend, or a mate that has recently found themselves single and lonely.  Or you could just buy it for yourself to flip through on days when you need a bit of a boost.  At only $5, it’s an absolute steal.

The Guide to Being Alone is available through Etsy.