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Making a Life of One's Own
by Kate Bolick
Book Reviewed by:A bold, original, moving book that will inspire fanatical devotion and ignite debate.
Whom to marry, and when will it happen - these two questions define every woman's existence. So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she - along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing - remains unmarried.
This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless - the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.
Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives - a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.
"Whom to marry, and when will it happen — these two questions define every woman's existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn't practice...men have their own problems; this isn't one of them." This provocative pronouncement is how Kate Bolick opens her combination memoir/women's studies book Spinster, which is in large part an attempt to imagine what might happen if women were to refuse to define themselves in terms of those two questions — in short to imagine a different narrative for the shape of their lives. Bolick, in her early forties as the book comes to a close, doesn't know what the future holds for her personally, but she has come a long way toward understanding what it might take for women to begin to write their own stories on their own terms...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In Spinster, Kate Bolick leans on the examples of women who have come before her, as a source of solace and encouragement for her own life choice to remain single. She found herself looking to the examples of five "awakeners," all talented women whose creativity and professional success were independent of their marital status.
One of these five "awakeners" is the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, a writer who was famous in her lifetime (1892-1950), perhaps almost as much for her sexual freedom and openness about sexuality as she was for her acclaimed sonnets. Millay was born in Maine, raised by a single mother, and attended Vassar College after winning a scholarship for her poem "Renascence." While at Vassar, she became romantically ...
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Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
What happens when you don't get married? Setting out to answer this question, Kate Bolick has written a moving, insightful, and important inquiry into how women's lives are narrated ... Ambitious in the best way, Spinster made me think differently about everything from novelistic plot to the meaning of furniture.
