3.5 stars. Thank you to Net Galley and Harper Perennial for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. I enjoyed the different take of the classic (for it's 60th anniversary) which now a bit outdated. This version has updated the title rightly from using the word "girl" to "woman". The authors were quite diverse and their stories ranged from topics such as sex, abortion, singlehood, single parenting, sexual consent, contraception, etc. Some refer to the original material; others discuss a related topic. I was expecting more advice such as the original but the title did note that it was a reimagining. Good stuff all the same.

Sex and the Single Woman is a book of feminist essays by a diverse group of authors. The essays cover a wide-range of topics pertinent to 2023: abortion, sexual consent, transexual women, etc. It was a good read and brought up a lot of important issues into one anthology.

This concept was long overdue for an update, but I'm not sure it was well-executed here. It's certainly a lot less problematic but I feel it could have packed more of a punch. I loved some essays, and others I didn't care for at all. All hail Morgan Parker.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have mixed feelings about this book. I expected it to be a book of essays before picking it up, but after reading the foreward, I think I was expecting a bit more self-help/advice in each essay. Instead, I think we got a really nice collection of essays about sex, being single, and being a woman. Which is important in its own right. I'm just not sure that advertising this as a reimagining of Sex and the Single Woman is correct. But then again, I haven't read the source material, so I might not be the best person to compare.

As a single person, I did really appreciate the different viewpoints and perspectives offered on being single. There was comfort to be drawn from these pages. Singleness is portrayed in a particular way in the media, and I think this book did a good job of fighting that stereotype.

This book cannot have come to me at a better time in my life. I started reading it about two days after my relationship ended and I was single for the first time in a long time. I have always been a fan of books that do not shy away from discussing sex and woman's pleasure. This book was incredibly well written, informative, and perfect for woman in 2022 who want to explore sex.

Firstly, thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this ARC for my honest review.

This was an interesting book of essays that covers topics like self-discovery, queer love, familial love and platonic love.

There are some really strong essays that carry this book as a whole collection, which carries the essays that feel a little disjointed and are seeming without a thesis. That being said, the strong essays really make me think and reflect about singlehood, how we perceive ourselves and how we show in a world that isn't built for us.

I had the honor of hearing a few of the contributing authors read in person at an event. I loved each one of their stories plus all the others that I read on my own. Each story was honest, vulnerable, and though some are harder to read, each was entertaining.

Thank you to Harper Perennial and Paperbacks and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this digital ARC of Sex and the Single Woman.

I LOVE a collection of essays, then throw in feminist vibes - Im all over it. Even though im not a single woman I do love to read about feminist topics. The unfortunately thins is I was not familiar with the book it references - and while I appreciated the stories I felt like they just needed something more. It was heavy than I thought it would be - but a decent read

Felt it was a bait and switch. I expected an update to Helen Gurley Brown’s light and cheerful how-to, which I’ve read and reread many times. This was just a series of personal essays, most of them pretty angsty. Not the type of thing I enjoy at all.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC copy for my review.

For starters, thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy of "Sex and the Single Woman" in return for an honest review!

Sex and the Single Woman makes a promise—and then it delivers. This collection of essays has been carefully chosen as an update of, and in response to, Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 "Sex and the Single Girl," a handbook designed to be a girl's guide to utilizing feminity as a tool for success, maximizing herself and her ability to perform within a patriarchal America. Editors Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson take no such avenue in their modernized rendition of the HGB.

As a reader who hadn't been familiar with the original source content, I found none of the discussion off-putting; the first few essays speak to HGB's work and lifetime in a way that I can get the gist without being a researched scholar. Her original work was progressive in its own right, but still fit within the norms of the time that assumed her reader to be a socially permissible prim, proper, straight/cis/white/abled woman like herself. Sixty years later, she's just outdated and patronizing.

This essay collection features the stories of women across ages, ethnicities, gender and sexual identities, and ability. The women write about being single, finding relationships, and everything in between, with a written emphasis on doing so for themselves rather than what is considered socially acceptable. Women write about love and divorce, coming out, working in the sex industry, finding and not finding pleasure, and so much more. Some essays are fun and light, whereas others can be strenuous reads; I wouldn't file this as a beach read, if that's what you're looking for. We see women pursuing satisfaction for themselves, not in the eyes of others. This collection is a much-needed update.

This book is a very unique take on Helen Gurley Browns legacy Sex and the Single Girl- affected for the modern age. This book starts out with a treatise on Helen Gurley Brown from her modern day biographer- then descents into stories of sexuality, as told through mothers, lesbians, women of color, fat women, queer folks- all in the purposes of telling stories of love and individuality, of making do with what you have and trying to find your own way. This is in line with Helen Gurley Brown and her work, which is debated heavily in this age as to whether or not she should viewed as a feminist icon or an enemy.

I think that the first essay sets the readers up well- she is a woman who tried to help other women win the proverbial "game" in the 1960s, when women didnt have any upper hands. Overall the book is an interesting treatise on simply being a woman- or more female-identified- in 2022, in the myriad of ways that means. Not to mention, the cover is exquisite.

Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Perennial for my ARC!

I did not love this! This book had a lot of potential, and I love the concept, but ultimately I didn't feel like the book was living up to it. Although I love many of the contributing authors, I didn't find most of these particular essays to be especially smart or critically engaging. (There are exceptions!) Here were a lot of the same thoughts on sex, race, gender, etc. that I feel like I usually see on the Internet, without any additional interrogation. This book also falls into the trap that many books about women and singlehood fall into: It feels like just about everyone either ends up in a relationship (usually with a man) or passionately wants one, whereas what I'm expecting are thoughts on being deliberately single. In this way I think a number of the essays here – queerness, of which there is plenty, aside – fall into the trap of Brown's original book: they purport to be about singlehood, but really they're about trying to break out of singlehood as quickly as possible.

I received an eARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Look. Sometimes things are classics for a reason. A beat-up copy of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl has sat on every bookshelf I've had since I was 15. I picked it up at a thrift store in my (future) college town. The pages were dogeared and certain passages were underlined.

I can't say that someone will do that with Sex and the Single Woman. This.....isn't great. This reads like it was written by young women trying to be controversial. It reads like xojane's "It Happened to Me" rejection articles. It's just......not good. While I understand the need to update the classic and bring up more modern topics (abortion, queer and trans voices) most of these read like a middle-school slumber party. I heard worse things while playing Girl Talk and putting red sticker 'zits' on my face.

It's been done and it's been done 100x better. Pick up Caitlin Moran. Pick up Amanda deCadanet, Cat Marnell, Rebecca Solnit, Laurie Penny....anything but this.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is a reimagining of the classic essays from Helen Gurley Brown but given a 21st century spin. The updated perspectives reveal the ways in which women have come so far and yet still stifled by patriarchy. The essays tackle sex [obviously], women's health, living on your own as a single woman, politics of being a woman, among other things. It is a fascinating read.

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy!

I was unfamiliar with the original book referenced, and appreciated many of the authors talking about their experiences when they first heard of it. Some of the essays were very scattered and was hard to make the connection to the topic. It took me awhile to read through this book. I expected a more lighthearted read, where this became heavy at times.

I enjoyed this anthology overall, though some of the essays resonated more with me than others. I really enjoyed the works by Rosemary Donahue, Samantha Allen, and Vanessa Friedman. Some essays I wish had been pushed a little further or given more time; Kristen Arnett's essay on boundaries in queer spaces, for example, really intrigued me, but I felt like it only scratched the surface. I noticed basically all of the contributors are popular online, and while I get it, I also wonder what the book might have looked like if these writers weren't (somewhat) relying on what's already known about them/their personas to fill in the skeletons of some of these pieces. Overall though, I appreciate that care went into making sure this book isn't only for/by cis, white, straight women, and that it explored some more traditionally taboo topics, like masturbation, celibacy, and polyamory.

Helen Gurley Brown's text is a classic, though as someone who's currently writing a dissertation on spinsters in American literature, I might be pretty biased. I really enjoyed this fresh, feminist update to Brown's work and felt that the editors selected a robust, diverse array of contributors to provide a much-needed change in perspective from Brown's original pov. I wished that even more of the essays tackled the source material straight on--the opening essay and Briallen Hopper's piece were standouts in this regard--but overall I found the essays to be interesting, exciting, and thought provoking. A truly great read for any woman, but I'd particularly like to gift this collection to the teens and twenty-somethings in my life!

I really enjoyed these short stories. If I learned anything from this it is that, women are not taught enough about sex education in school. I think it is so sad to hear about all these women growing up believing false information due to a lack of education. I think it is fascinating reading about other women's stories, and hearing how similar our experiences are. This book was really eye-opening and I think all women should read this.

Before requesting this book, I'd never heard of Helen Gurley Brown or her book, which, considering the first essay included in this one, is probably a good thing. It was very easy to read Sex and the Single Woman without having the knowledge of the work this book tries to reinvent, which I am also very grateful for, considering that Brown's sounds like a bore and this one was too, at times.
A lot of essays I liked — When a Man Isn't a Man, by Samantha Allen and Are You Having Sex by Natalie Lima being my two favorites — but I have to admit some of the time I found myself asking what was the point of a lot of the work included in this collection. I won't lie and say I know everything there is to know about feminism, but some of the essays felt really basic, your middle school friend trying to teach you how to tongue kiss without having to actually kiss you, type of feminism. And to pile on top of that, a lot of the essays felt scattered and misplaced in the general context. Some of them would go on for several pages longer than they should, adding pratically nothing, while others with very interesting ideas were so short to the point of it not having time to say anything.
While some essays where charming — In Pursuit of Brown-on-Brown love by Jennifer Chowdhury, for example — I am a firm believer that expressions like "ho phase" and especially "vibe check" should never, under any circumstance appear in a book. And this can be kind of a mindless criticism but it must be made: the writing style of most writers really gave away that they are millennials, which isn't a bad thing on its own, but really gets tiring to read after a while.

I liked this a lot! I appreciated that you didn't need to have read the original book to understand these essays, and I thought the editors did a good job picking diverse and non-repetitive essays.