Living alone is usually treated as a symptom: of divorce, of widowhood, of a broken dating market, of a frayed country. Table for One argues that it is something else. The household of one has become one of the most ordinary ways to live in America. The Census Bureau's 2025 survey counted 39.7 million one-person households, 29 percent of all households, against roughly one in thirteen in 1940.
This book explains how that happened. Americans grew richer, lived longer, married later and less often, divorced in middle and late life, and had fewer children. For a great many of them the result is a life they wanted. The real trouble lies elsewhere: where living alone combines with frailty, poverty or being unseen, and in a country whose houses, prices, benefits and legal forms were drawn around a household of two or more and have never been redrawn.
From the quiet census and the widow's house to men without friends, hours without anyone, the singles tax, and the papers a life alone requires, Table for One follows the whole story with clear reporting and careful sourcing. It is for readers who live alone, who love someone who does, or who simply want to understand how the American household changed and what it still owes the people in it.
