New This Week: How to Be Single by Liz Tuccillo

Because the lines between fiction and non-fiction have not been blurred enough, Liz Tuccillo -- one of the co-authors of He’s Not That Into You and one of the story editors of HBO’s Sex and the City -- delivers big with How to Be Single (Atria). Here we meet Julie Jenson, a Manhattan book publicist who quits her job in order to travel the world to see how women everywhere are dealing with being single.

What confuses here is the tone: the book is definitely a novel. In fact, that’s the subtitle: A Novel. Yet it reads like non-fiction and, if her bio and recent interviews are to be believed, the author did a fair amount of research for the book.

I don’t know: maybe it’s just me and my own expectations, but in some ways How to Be Single feels like one of those non-fiction fiascos, only backwards. Can real life pretend to be a novel? Well, I guess on one level, that happens all the time. Yet, when it does, there tends to be a stronger whiff of artistry in the air, a more palpable hint of magic. It’s not that How to Be Single isn’t good, in fact, there are some moments of great humor and even charm. But if it’s real, I want it real. And if it’s not, I want a little less reality.