I’m trying hard not to hate Kate Bolick because she’s beautiful. But there she is, on the cover of her new book/ode to the single woman, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, perched on the edge of an antique velvet sofa with a cup of tea in a patterned china cup—how spinstery!—dressed in a cocktail dress and heels with her hair in long, glossy auburn waves, like in a shampoo ad. The whole photo is meant to appeal to the sort of retro thinker who never learned that a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle, who will say, “How can she possibly be single?” (Translation: this woman has chosen her singleness!)
But, as Bolick states, Austenishly, at the beginning of chapter one of Spinster,
But I will grant Bolick that, even though marriage no longer as necessary as it used to be, and that now it seems like the decision about whether to have children has a greater and more permanent impact on a woman’s life, many of us, both hitched and single, still see marriage as a major marker in the great circle of life, and it’s hard not to read a book on the subject and keep yourself with arguing with its author and thinking about your own personal experiences and how they stand up against her experiences, examples, theses, statistics, etc.
The problem is that Bolick’s exploration of the issue is simultaneously too general—because it attempts to address all women—and too specific—because it uses the lens of Bolick’s experience and the experiences of five woman writers she admires—to be very satisfying. The whole book reads like a 300-page article in a glossy women’s magazine, a jumble of research, helpful statistics, mini-biographies of spinsters of the past, filled out with a great deal of—probably too much—detail about Bolick’s own dating history and the evolution of her personal philosophy of spinsterdom. (And it did, in fact, start off as a cover story for the Atlantic, where Bolick is a contributing editor.)
In any case, Bolick had a typical middle-class upbringing with kind and encouraging parents and a friendly younger brother. Her mother died when she was 23; this remains the greatest sorrow of her life. She has always been bright and athletic and gregarious and popular, both with girls/women and boys/men. Her career as a writer and editor has had its ups and downs, but, overall, has been satisfying. She has a warm and supportive circle of friends.
But then she continues:
