Spinster: A Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick, book review:

Although Bolick dismantles the stereotypes of single women, she willingly buys into an idea of marriage that doesn’t quite ring true

Spinster: A Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick

In an entertaining but fundamentally unsatisfying reclamation of spinsterhood, Kate Bolick puts a stake through the heart of Bridget Jones, the singleton who wanted to be anything but.

Part memoir, part polemic, it’s informative and beautifully written but suffers from an identity crisis not too dissimilar from Bolick’s own. It would have made a wonderful memoir – about grief and recovery, about learning to love solitude – or a wonderfully human biography of any of the women Bolick discovers in her quest for historical precedent.

In setting out a manifesto for the independent woman, Bolick fails to look outside her own social circle. She overlooks, for one, the legion of gay women for whom marriage was never a legal option for much of their lives.

Rejecting the settled domesticity and professional success that is the supposed happy ending of the single girl in a New York story, Bolick at her best brings to mind Megan Daum, whose recent writing on being childfree has the fresh, radical edge that Bolick aims for and misses. At her worst, she’s less Lena Dunham than Dunham’s hapless and self-absorbed alter ego on Girls.

Although Bolick does an admirable job of dismantling the stereotypes of single women that have persisted throughout history, she willingly buys into an idea of marriage that doesn’t quite ring true. She frequently conflates “single” with “independent”, as though in the 21st century women still give up all legal rights and personhood in exchange for a wedding ring. And do married women really have an innate air of superiority and disinterest in anyone outside their nuclear family?

Many of Bolick’s arguments have merit, but pitting them against a straw groom doesn’t do them any justice. And when the introduction of same-sex marriage turns a wedding into a radical act of subversion, can single life really occupy the ideological high horse?

Despite the incoherence of some of its arguments, Spinster is an enjoyable if frustrating read. Bolick’s prose is engrossing – dreamy in the personal sections, passionate and inspiring in the biographical parts, and it’s this that lifts it out of the muddy no man’s land between memoir and feminist polemic.