Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life

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Arrangements in Blue is as bold as it is beautiful. Key is not afraid to go to the depths of her longings, but in doing so she creates something new: a space for the voice of solitude, one that is full of heart and creativity for a personal intimacy with home, friends and the self. If a book can be a loving companion, this is it. Lily Dunn, author of Sins of my Father Profound and poetic, vulnerable yet brave, I devoured Amy Key's memoir about love, loss, memory and hope. An incredible writer, a stunning debut." What makes “Arrangements in Blue” so powerful is Key's vulnerability and candidness. She explores themes of loneliness, desire, jealousy, regret, friendship, and self-realization with rare integrity and courage. 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.

AB: I’m curious about the role shame plays in all this, and the way it shapes women’s interior lives. I had always thought that in Blue Joni had taught me about love, about being in love and losing it. Now I think it’s more that Joni taught me about longing. About the gap between what you want and what you have, and what you have and what you had wanted. From grief to anger to full-throttled joy, Amy Key hits every note of feeling with perfect pitch... A brave and brilliant exploration of how one woman lives both alone and alongside romance. An absolutely gorgeous work. Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book

The notion of romanticising pain is the trap I didn’t know I’d fallen into. On her album Ladies of the Canyon – the one that came before Blue – there is a song called ‘Willy’ which feels to me like the gateway to Blue’s sensibilities. She sings: You’re bound to lose if you let the blues get you scared to feel. I would apply that logic to the men I have desired. They were just too scared to feel for me and I was the brave woman who put her heart in harm’s way. What is biting at me now is the realisation that I’m the one who is scared to feel. I’ve kept myself away from love. I thought it was the responsible thing to do, to limit the harms I might inflict on myself, after all I’m not to be trusted. But in doing so I’ve enacted a different kind of harm. I’ve limited and denied myself. I’ve not met the romantic potential I assumed I had. AB: There’s a kind of reclamation of desire in that, too. In refusing to have it bound up in shame. A beautiful, painful, liberating book. Amy Key writes with such tenderness and insight about a life without romantic love at its centre, exacting as to its impoverishments, exultant over its many and unexpected riches."

Using Joni Mitchell's seminal album Blue- an album that shaped Key's expectations of love - as her guide, she examines the unexpected life she has created for herself. 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. 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. 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. When I am cooking, I sing a line from Joni’s ‘My Old Man’ to myself, ‘the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide’. That’s what the couple sharing the pillow brought to mind: they seemed like the kind of couple who’d never spent a night apart. I love my empty bed; it never feels too big for me. And I’ve slept alone for so many years that I find it hard to share a bed these days. The frying pan on the other hand. The frying pan has an altogether different intimate energy. Perhaps it’s because people so often fry eggs for someone they love. And to eat eggs together suggests a synchronised hunger, suggests sleeping and waking together, and says please linger, please stay. Perhaps it’s the sweet balance of ‘you cook and I’ll wash up’, how the pan moves from one person’s job to another, and the ordinariness of that joint endeavour. key's prose is luminous and poetic throughout the book, but it particularly shines in the later chapters. i loved the "crazy" chapter detailing her experiences with men which lasted months and years but never fell under the placeholder of "partner/boyfriend" and found it very relatable. key's candour about these relationships (because yes! you are allowed to call them relationships) is so refreshing - i often feel women are pressured into diminishing the impact of the people who treat us badly, especially if this happens outside the limits of a clearly defined romantic partnership. her description of caring for her friend and mentor roddy lumsden through his illness and eventually mourning him after his death is painfully honest but shot through with such tenderness that i nearly cried listening to it. and the final chapter is a beautiful end to the book, with such warm and hopeful reflections on human connection and care outside and within romantic love.The chapters in which she confronts the peculiarities of being single head on are the best: the desire for a child, the desire for romantic love, the role and value of friendships, all the love with nowhere to go in a society that recognizes only romantic love as real and worthy. There are a few more tangential chapters: making a home and going on holiday might be different when undertaken alone, but are not central to the experience of being single to me (anymore). As a result, it feels like she's sometimes too hung up on her status as a single woman, as if every single aspect of life revolves around relationship status. It doesn't and it shouldn't, but I can imagine it feels like that for some people or sometimes. But what happens when—the romance we are all told will give life meaning never presents itself?? Now single in her forties, Key explores the sweeping scales of romantic feeling as she has encountered them, using the album Blue as an expressive anchor: from the low notes of loss and unfulfilled desire—punctuated by sharp, discordant feelings of jealousy and regret—to the deep harmony of friendship, and the crescendos of sexual attraction and self-realization. British poet and essayist Key ( Isn't Forever) takes an intimate, idiosyncratic look at single life in her evocative first memoir ... 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."

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. 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. A romantic dynamic is not enough. Being loved by friends is not enough. I am ready to face that, but unsure how to move out from the fear position. To say this is the sex I want. This is the communication I want. This is reciprocity I expect. To understand at forty-two years old that I’ve never had a relationship with these elements in place. The idea I have never felt safe in a romantic relationship feels painful, and that for half of my life I’ve existed on romantic scraps, that feels humiliating. As though I am utterly unloveable – the fear that rushes in, on ‘dark cafe days’. In ‘All I Want’ Joni sings, ‘I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some’ . A manifesto of romantic ambivalence, of how the mind ‘see-saws’ when you love. Joni plays a stringed instrument I had always assumed to be a guitar, but now know is an Appalachian dulcimer, which she used for the first time on Blue. The dulcimer flits cleanly between chords, but is tonally nervy – a musical agitation, and Joni’s mezzo-soprano voice glides above it, making full use of its range. It wasn’t until recently that I paid attention to the line ‘I love you, when I forget about me’. In the loving I’ve done I’ve often obliterated my sense of self: I’ve not located my needs, let alone asked for them to be met. I have just doggedly pursued a kind of abstract reciprocation, and because I’ve not paid enough attention to what I want, the vast contrast between what I want and what I’ve received hasn’t been as visible to me.I wonder if we all lose by centring romantic love in our lives,” writes Key. “Is it possible that life without romantic love isn’t so bad?” But if so, “is it OK to still want romantic love too?” In Arrangements in Blue Amy Key finds a language, searing in its depth and honesty, for desire, shame, grief and, crucially, for compassion. Kayo Chingonyi, A Blood Condition 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”. When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn't happen for her. Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. 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."