‘This Might Be Too Personal’ Author Alyssa Shelasky Became a Single Mother By Choice, Then Found Love on Tinder

As the editor of New York magazine’s Sex Diaries and a former dating columnist at Glamour, Alyssa Shelasky has covered love and all of its kinks. She’s inspired comparisons to Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw, and her first book, Apron Anxiety, documented her romance with Top Chef star Spike Mendelsohn. (Shelasky, then a People staffer, finagled their first date by faking an interview with him.)

The greatest love story Shelasky has ever told, though, comes in her new memoir, This Might Be Too Personal, in which she writes with characteristic honesty about becoming a single mother to her daughter, Hazel, via an anonymous sperm donor. One heartfelt chapter is a love letter to the donor, a man Shelasky calls Vince Vaughn (the celebrity cited as his lookalike by California Cryobank). “Of all the men I’ve trusted thus far,” Shelasky writes, “you are the only one who has never disappointed me.”

Despite three past engagements (and one passionate romance with her dentist), Shelasky has ultimately evaded the trappings of marriage. This Might Be Too Personal opens with her tripping in strappy heels and falling, bloodied, to the sidewalk after fleeing a wedding she’d attended with her ex-fiancé; just the night before, she’d called off their own wedding, enticed by the “heat and sting” of her new role as a party reporter for Us Weekly (incidentally, she bumps into one of her chief celebrity crushes—no spoilers—after regaining her footing and searching for an ATM). Yet she would later find love in an unlikely time and place—while swiping through Tinder and breastfeeding six-month-old Hazel. (She and her partner, Sam, now share Hazel, 7, and a son, River, 2.) 

Vogue spoke with Shelasky about her path to single motherhood by choice, a significant run-in with Sarah Jessica Parker, and why she’s still fiercely anti-marriage.

Vogue: I voraciously read your book in a day and I also sent it to my sister-in-law, who is a new single mom by choice. You write about having coffee with a really cool woman who had already had a baby on her own when you were still considering it. Did she, in a way, give you permission?