Book Review: "Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own" by Kate Bolick

Kate Bolick has an inviting writing voice--humorous, literate, and with the easy conversational style of a pedagogical big sister.  She moves easily between personal memoir, the history of spinsterhood, and the biography of five literary women, who were each, for at least part of their lives, single.

Her primary mission in the book seems to work out the tug-of-war she feels between sharing her life with a partner and between the pleasures of solitude.  As her biographical research evidences, she is not the first human being to grapple with this dichotomy, nor will she be the last.

I heard it expressed in my grandmother's recurring explanation:  "I'm going to fly the coop!"  Or in my mother's wish for a simpler life, where she need only keep a small, tidy apartment.  Kate Bolick calls this the "spinster wish," this deep longing for solitude.

In college, I devoured Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  She confirmed for me something that I knew in my heart to be true.  Every one who wants it should have time and space to call their own.  Not all relationships leave allow one to have space and time of one's own.  

Unlike the spinster of old who was necessarily a virgin, Bolick continues to date in her single state, which doesn't really fit my conception of the spinster as withering on the vine.  But Bolick seems to think this is the opinion of society.  "Those of us who've bypassed the exits for marriage and children tend to motor through our thirties like unlicensed drivers, unauthorized grown-ups." (5)  She says that over time, single women have been "a lightening rod for attitudes toward women in general," caricatures of selflessness (Mother Teresa), eccentricity (Holly Golightly), and power (Joan of Arc). (15)

She believes that the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay's "embrace of possibility, and willingness to improvise rather / than 'nail down' a life, discomfits and disrupts now as much as it did then." (151-152)  If she's right, and I'm not sure that it is, why should the freedom of others bother us?  My suspicion is that we, most of us, covet a similar freedom--the freedom "to love whomever you want, as abundantly as you can.  Her legacy wasn't recklessness," Bolick writes," but a fierce individualism that even now evades our grasp." (152)

Bolick plays up the dichotomy, but the seeds of a solution are in her book.  There is space for both solitude and companionship.  It is the longing for each which ensures that each continues to be honored in turn.