Kate Bolick’s New Book, ‘Spinster,’ Frolicks in Singlehood
“You are born, you grow up, you become a wife. But what if it wasn’t this way?’’
These words, innocuously placed four pages into Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, a new book by Kate Bolick, aren’t set in bold, but may as well be. They stare the reader in the face, both a statement about the current attitudes about singlehood and a call to action.
Bolick’s main argument? Not everyone in life is striving toward marriage as an endgame.
She’s become something of a relationship guru for those not in relationships ever since her smash essay, “All the Single Ladies,’’ appeared in The Atlantic in 2011.
Whereas “All the Single Ladies’’ was framed around the economic rise of women, Bolick’s newest literary endeavor comes in part from the reaction (what she called “a post-written prelude’’) to her Atlantic essay.
“After The Atlantic article, there was all this discussion about marriage and singledom,’’ Bolick said. “People were talking about it as though it was all brand new, but these conversations have been going on for 150 years.’’
In Spinster, Bolick engages with five “awakeners’’: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maeve Brennan, Neith Boyce, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. These were real women whose lives and work she used as a lens for grappling with her own place in society as a single lady.
“I was habitually reading the books these women had written, and that had been written about them,’’ said Bolick. “I was creating an imaginary conversation for myself in which I was discussing about how best to live.’’
She interweaves their narratives with her own tales of growing up in Newburyport, vacationing in Maine, attending Colby College, writing for The Atlantic Monthly, attending graduate school at NYU, and more, all while bouncing between relationships and eventually landing in the world of singlehood at 28.
But this wasn’t an accident. Though she said that she hasn’t written off marriage, she wants to show that women can be single by choice, and happy about it.
“When you’re viewing someone by their relationship, it’s in a static way. ‘She’s single. She’s a mom. She’s married.’ We have perceived ideas about who they are,’’ said Bolick. “People hear ‘single’ and they tend to immediately have pitying associations. ‘Oh, she must be lonely, sad, looking to become un-single.’ But look at how limiting that is.’’
Her words have resonated with readers around the country; she said that she gets a lot of mail from women saying, essentially, “Finally! Someone who gets it!’’
“I love hearing from people,’’ Bolick said. “I find people endlessly interesting. I really like hearing their stories.’’
She said that hearing from readers gives her insight into how other people feel about these topics.
“I’ve always been that friend who loves to talk for hours about relationships,’’ said Bolick. “Now I’m just talking about it in a personal way with strangers more than with friends.’’
Despite all of this personal experience, she insisted she is no relationship expert. Still, she has some thoughts on today’s approaches to attitudes about single people.
On the subject of online dating…
“I’ve never done it, but the pressure is so real,’’ she said. “We do live in the age of the Internet now, so there’s no reason not to do it. But it’s very frustrating that women are always being told they have to ‘put themselves out there.’ They might be perfectly fine not dating right now. They might not feel pressure to be in a relationship right now, and they don’t have to.’’
On the ‘cat lady,’ ‘free spirit,’ and other categories…
“I think it comforts people to play a role. It makes it easier to navigate the complexities of their own lives, you know, ‘I’m such-and-such a way,’’ said Bolick.
She invoked the example of Millay as a model of the sort of “free-spirited’’ woman that she used to think she had to be.
“You think free-spirited and think ‘I can’t be tamed or slowed down.’ I never could be that, and I felt inadequate because I couldn’t. That seemed so great, so romantic, so brave and strong to be that way, and that was the imaginary idea in my head that I’d compare myself against and feel so lacking.’’
On romantic comedies…
Though she didn’t have strong feelings about the genre — she said she doesn’t really watch them — Bolick did have strong thoughts on who she’d like to play her if her own life became a film.
“Ellen Page. Or Carrie Mulligan. I love them. I can’t think of who would be a contemporary, 40-something-me…’’ she said. “Ellen Page is probably my ultimate. She’s small, brown-haired…And her coming out speech was just so powerful.’’
On well-meaning relatives who don’t quite get it…
“Grandparents are operating out of genuine concern. They lived in a different era, and saw a different on-the-ground reality. Marriage was much more important then, so to see young people not getting married…it’s alarming and distressing.’’
To manage this, Bolick advised telling them about how things are different for you. According to her, talking about the ways in which you’re happy might assuage their fears and show that you’re neither miserable nor lonely.
Got that, Mom and Dad?
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