Spinster

Washington Square Arch, New York City

“A lady who used to walk through the park forty and thirty and twenty and ten years ago could have walked there the other morning and found that, after all, nothing had really changed very much,” wrote Maeve Brennan in 1966 about Washington Square Park
.

Copyright © 2015 by Kate Bolick

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:

Edith Konecky: excerpts from diary entries by Edith Konecky about Maeve Brennan, copyright © 1974 by Edith Konecky. All rights reserved. Reprinted courtesy of Edith Konecky.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: excerpt from “Her Kind” from
To Bedlam and Part Way Back
by Anne Sexton, copyright © 1960 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1988 by Linda G. Sexton. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and the Society of Authors: excerpt from “Professions for Women” from
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
by Virginia Woolf, copyright © 1942 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1970 by Marjorie T. Parsons, Executrix. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and the Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

Russell & Volkening: excerpt from a letter by Maeve Brennan to William Maxwell, 1965 and excerpt from a letter by Maeve Brennan to Tillie Olsen, from Edith Konecky's folders, c. 2003, both excerpts copyright © The Estate of Maeve Brennan. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.

Portions of this book have been adapted from material by the author that first appeared in
The Atlantic, Elle, The New York Observer, Poetry
, and
Slate
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bolick, Kate.

Spinster: a life of one's own / Kate Bolick.—First edition.

1. Bolick, Kate. 2. Authors, American—21st century—Biography.

3. Single women—United States—Psychology. I. Title.

CT275.B583136A3 2015

973.932092—dc23

[B]      2014037871

ISBN 9780385347136

eBook ISBN 9780385347143

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch

Illustrations by Heather Gatley

Cover design by Christopher Brand

Cover photograph by Peter Yang

See
this page
for interior photography credits
.

v4.1

a

To my father, my brother,

and the memory of my mother

In writing about my life and the lives of others, I sought to be personal without being confessional. I faithfully adhered to factual information (names, places, chronology, dates), but to protect the privacy of those still living I occasionally changed identifying details, used initials instead of names, and sometimes told only part of the story.

You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be.

—Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,”
1931

This is our little while. This is our chance.

—Susan Glaspell
, The People, 1917

For several summers when I was a child my family vacationed on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. Barely a fleck on the map, it's a mile at the longest point, a scruffy bramble of fir trees and rocky beaches, no hotels or stores or restaurants, not even cars, only a scattering of forty or so once-grand summer homes sagging on their foundations. While the adults read or played tennis on the dusty clay courts, we children disappeared into an alternate universe, sprinting in bathing suits along gritty dirt roads and across wide green lawns, the salt air noisy with foghorns and birdcalls.

To reach the beach we raced down a path cut between hedges so tall that it felt like a chute bursting forth onto the sand and sea, catapulting us into yet another dimension. When the tide was low, rather than leap into the surf with the others, I'd break away to an isthmus of tidal pools and boulders to “play Karana.” She was the heroine of my favorite children's novel,
Island of the Blue Dolphins
, based on the true story of a Native American girl who'd been left behind on an island off the coast of California in the early 1800s and who survived on her own for eighteen years.

First, I'd gather driftwood “whalebones” to stake in the damp sand in the shape of a circle—my “hut.” There was always some plastic container washed up onshore to serve as my “woven basket.” These basic preparations secure, I'd set about hunting snails. The little beasts were beyond plentiful, studding the giant rocks all around me, suctioned so tightly I had to hack at them with a stone until they clattered off. Briskly, before they could reattach themselves, I'd sweep their hard, round bodies into my “woven basket” and hurry to my “fire pit”—a hollow worn into a boulder—to “cook” them in seawater, then brutally smash their shells, pluck their dark, slimy selves from the broken shards, and pretend to “eat.” That my make-believe meal was so revolting sweetened my sense of conquest.

I built, then, my own kingdom according to my own laws, and when the sun beat down, it beat down only on me, and when my feet acclimated to the freezing water, it was my resilience that made this so. My experience of being alone was total.