I am a single woman of the age of one and thirty. I have read my share of singledom memoirs and some are better than others. I just walked over to my bookshelf at pulled two books I thought that were better than Spinster on describing “Spinsters” and Female Literary Role Models:

Bachelor Girl, Betsy Israel
Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life, Stephanie Staal

The first problem I had with Bolick, because for most of her book she was attached but while being attached she wanted to be a Spinster. So, while she was mostly attached for most of her twenties and thirties to someone or the idea of someone, she writes a book about not wanting or needing to be attached to someone else. I had a hard time accepting her mantra of wanting to be alone when she is writing the humblebrags of getting asked out at parties and being proposed to and she turning them down. Her life is not a life of a typical single gal and I knew that before I read it, but there was something about her writing this memoir that made me not trust her as a narrator, other than trying to downplay herself to be every woman or that fact that she decided to write about being a Spinster because she wasn’t married but could have if she wanted. She choose to be Single, usually a Spinster doesn’t choose.

The books was twofold, one about her searching for spinsterhood and writing about the 5 female writers that inspired her, she called “awakeners”. I am guessing that it is a play on the word and with the title of Kate Chopin’s, “The Awakening,” but I don’t know because Bolick never really explained using the word “awakener.” The connections were rough and not fluid that you would expect from a season writer. While I like her five writer inspirations, their inclusion in the memoir felt force with the Spinster narrative she was also writing to write. They turned out be sections of a biography instead of incorporating within her memoir. While all of the writers did their best work when they were alone, and if they were married, the marriage hindered the art and most of their lives were also tragic. Her writing voice changed when she was writing about the five female authors and I wondered why. Was it the editor in her that made her view them with a critical eye that she was ignoring in her own life when she wrote? When she wrote about herself, the writing was more sincere in tone, other than the moments I couldn’t trust her voice as the narrator.

Overall, it was a dense work. I got halfway and decided that I would finish because I was hoping that Bolick had a revelation or that the writing got better and more fluid. I really liked her article she did for the Atlantic, “All the Single Ladies.” There was no trying to merge her life into the lives of five females she respected and admire. She wasn’t trying to justify a title of her book by trying to make everything thought, phrase and event relate to Spinster.

Okay memoir, but there are better ones out there on the same subject.