Donna Ward’s memoir explores spinsterhood, solitude, and shattering stereotypes.

Publisher and poet Donna Ward describes this, her first book, as a meander through her life. In describing it this way she is thinking poor, as she admits to doing when she was younger. In fact, She I Dare Not Name is a superbly crafted memoir composed of 27 personal essays, each of which could stand on its own as a meditation on, for example, silence, solitude, friendship, or the meaning of life. Altogether, it shows how she, a learned woman whose childhood was unusual but whose aspirations were not, arrives at a spinsterhood she finds surprising, challenging and, ultimately, rewarding:

This book is a meditation on the life that came of choosing the best happiness on offer. It is a meander through my life as an Australian spinster that bears witness to how I created meaning and belonging without the automatic answers that family, children, and lovers provide. I write to shatter the stereotype that shadows me in a singular narrative, a narrative that writes me out of my own society. I write because in the twenty-first century others choose, or are chosen, to live this life more frequently.

Other books on the subject of spinsterhood cite statistics and discuss the sociology of the worldwide trend away from conventional familial forms. Ward’s book is not like these. It is more personal, as one might expect from an author who has worked as a psychotherapist and undertaken years of Jungian analysis. It is rich in the data of dreams and mythology. It is analytical and self-aware and, in places, funny. It is always relatable and vividly rendered. One can see her sitting on her own in a cafe, drinking and eating and writing. This book, possibly. She gestures with her hands at the arrival of a satisfying sentence. As she waves, she notices the disapproving looks she has attracted from some of the patrons: the ‘peopled’ patrons.

The road through solitary is heroic, the most terrible of paths, an odyssey into the invisible, and circular. Solitary is stifling, seems impossible to leave. It shrieks with unforgiving gods, and wild imaginings. The traveller trips into loneliness, wallows in lamentation, throbs with molecules of meaninglessness. Not everyone returns, and those who do come clad in a different disposition.

Ward trudges the heroic road, inoculating herself against the ‘body ache of loneliness’ by drinking copious amounts of wine and moving back and forth from the west coast city of Perth to the city where she now resides, Melbourne. She nests in various fabulous-sounding houses and acquires excellent cooking skills. She struggles with depression. She goes on bushwalks and communes with the elements. She reads, learns how to write, starts a magazine. As you do. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘there’s an occupation that occupies.’ She waits for friends to ring. They fit her in around the edges of their responsibilities. Friendship, she notes without any apparent rancour, is ‘… a touch that comes and goes, without obligation, often without farewell’.

By the time she is in her late fifties, she has adjusted, as she puts it, to ‘living the life to hand’. The disposition in which she is clad is distinctive because, in order to survive it, many things, such as friendship, and ideas, such as feminism, have been stripped of their conceits. Ward has become robustly clear-eyed. The only thing about which she remains romantic is nature. She is so tender and knowing about it, I felt guilty for being someone who could be standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and barely notice. Natural phenomena are Ward’s intimates, her companions and comfort as she approaches that crevasse towards which we are all edging, with or without special people, and with or without the wisdom that she has acquired:

Usually the moon lights my bedroom at the height of her cycle, like the solstice sun illuminates an Egyptian tomb. It’s our agreement. She, the sun, the stars, the trees outside, the rain, the earth and the rivers running through it are my intimates, the benign witnesses to my life. I sleep with the blinds open, so they can watch over me. Should I fall unnoticed, like Icarus on a Bruegel landscape, I know they will keep company with me.

Donna Ward She I Dare Not Name: A spinster’s meditations on life Allen & Unwin 2020 PB 336pp $29.99

Shelley McInnis is a memoirist and book reviewer who lives happily and productively and peacefully and singly in Canberra, which she has called home since she migrated from the USA in 1973, when Nixon was still the President.

You can buy She I Dare Not Name from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

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