KATE BOLICK Spinster: Making a life of one’s own. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
This dignified and lyrical memoir depicts the struggle for a convention-free spinster’s lifestyle.
The anomalous spinster adorning the cover of this memoir shows Kate Bolick, looking gorgeous enough to be cast in Sex and the City, sitting alone on a lush settee, right hand balancing a delicate teacup and saucer, left hand conspicuously minus a wedding ring. Her smile is neither demure nor coy but unselfconsciously pleased with itself: the perfect invitation for the projections and assumptions that do tend to be made about women like Bolick, who has managed so far to bypass what she describes as the ‘traditional exits’ of marriage and motherhood.
Bolick was already well on her way to spinsterhood when she decided, at a seaside clambake in honour of her 40th birthday, that it was about time that she, a New York-based critic, columnist and essayist, paid her writerly respects to the freedom-loving spinsters who had encouraged her to carve out her own convention-free lifestyle:
Watching my family mingle with friends from every stage of my life, some they’d known forever and others they’d never met, I began to sense a shift in my perception, a growing awareness that I was now in possession of not only a future, but also a past. It was almost a physical sensation, as if everything I’d ever thought or done had been embroidered onto the long train of a gown that now trailed behind me wherever I went. When I looked over my shoulder to inspect this feat of silken wizardry, there they were, my five ghostly awakeners, holding it aloft.
Bolick’s ‘ghostly awakeners’, including essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, poet Edna St Vincent Millay, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, hold aloft this book, which might otherwise read as a tiresome memoir of someone in need of Sex-and-Love-Addicts Anonymous. Bolick analyses the lives of these women in the context of their times – they were all habitués of Greenwich Village around the turn of the 20th century – and relates them to the challenges of her own. These colourful, astonishing women, two of whom I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of before, give Bolick the point of view, the words, and the courage to imagine and attempt to establish an authentic life of her own.
It is clear from the very beginning of Spinster that Bolick has not only a yen for freedom, but also a fairly ordinary desire for love and security. This conflict is evident in her relationships with a series of men described only by an initial. Here she is, describing the beginning of the end of her relationship with ‘R’, a perfectly nice chap with whom she’d been happy for a couple of years:
And because we were happy, neither of us noticed as I very slowly started to wander off, down the two flights of stairs and past the soft, mowed pelt of front lawn, to the street, which I followed to another, and then another, not paying attention to where I was going, until one day I looked up and saw that I was nowhere near where our life was taking place, but at the edge of some huge unknown expanse, and when I looked behind me, I saw that I had no idea how I’d gotten there, that the path of return had disappeared, and so, like a sly child who doesn’t know what’s good for her, I stood gaping at the strange, wide openness, wondering what it held, instead of turning around and finding my way back the way I’d come.
Over the approximately 20 years covered by this memoir, despite the enlightenment offered up by her formidable spinster mentors, Bolick remains pretty much in the same place she was on page 53, where this quote comes from: gaping and wondering, and turning around. By the end of the book you will want to tear your hair out every time a new initial appears, but Bolick’s voice is always so dignified, her prose so lyrical, her struggle so worthy, you will be inclined to forgive her. Besides, change takes time. ‘Habit is habit,’ Mark Twain once noted, ‘and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time.’ Hear, hear.
Kate Bolick Spinster: Making a life of one’s own Corsair 2015 PB 336pp $23.50
Shelley McInnis is a Canberra-based book reviewer and spinster who once worked as a journalist, lecturer, and health policy analyst.
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‘Spinster’ – such a loaded word. It too will take time to change its meaning. This sounds like a well examined life, worth reading. Thank you.