Seeking a Life of Her Own is a non-fiction book weaving through with photography and is the full-length version of Women at Home, the documentary series directed by the author Amos Xianjing Dai in 2022. Since 2016, camera in hand, she has been a quiet visitor pushing open one door after another into the homes of women living solo, exploring the daily spaces and inner lives of their solitude, and how they connect with fast-changing Chinese society and a complex world.

Among the many women the author has interviewed, this book focuses on fourteen, ranging in age from 20 to 70, including a single mother, a social media creator, a scholar, an insurance broker, a retired professor, an entrepreneur, and elderly women living on a remote island, and others. It explores the choices behind their lives of living alone, the changes of an era. They shared their thoughts on loneliness, freedom, desire and fear; on love, intimacy, and longing; on the everyday lives close at hand and the distant worlds they imagine.

Behind the stories of these 14 women runs the author’s own story, woven throughout the book. This is not simply a collection of interviews. The author is the subject. Starting from her own confusion, she narrates in the first person and meets more and more women along the way, tracing the warmth and kinship between them and the connections between their inner worlds.

Living alone is only the narrative way in. The real questions the interviews explore are: In a rapidly developing contemporary China, how can a woman live on her own terms? Where do her certainty and resilience stem from? How does each decision take shape?