What I'm Reading: 'Spinster' by Kate Bolick

At no point has this book met my expectations; when the title first came across my radar (full title, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own ), I thought it sounded like a pseudo-feminist book about solitude and was therefore right up my alley, much in the vein of a Rebecca Solnit book. Then I saw and was horrified by the cover, which led me to believe it was some kind of humorous self-help book. I truly cannot understand what they intended with that cover -- this is not an apt comparison because a man would never write a book about being single, but if he did, there certainly wouldn't be a picture of him on the cover. And if there was a picture of him on the cover, he wouldn't be drinking tea (?) but dressed for cocktails and generally looking sassy. At this point, I decided against reading it.

But then my friend Marie (my best "girl bachelor" friend) recommended it enthusiastically, so I decided to give it a chance; I was pleased to find that it was not at all as vapid as the cover indicates it will be, but I was still a little let down in the end. As confused as I was about what this book is, the book itself seems equally confused about what it wants to be. Bolick's style is so, so writerly, and every sentence carries the weight of years of journalism and MFA training. The resulting prose is stilted and heavy. The book is actually structured around five particular single women/writers who had a profound influence on Bolick's life, and yet these five women are not in any way acknowledged until you really dig in to the text. Bolick has an infuriating habit of assuming the reader knows enough about the women (such as Edna St. Vincent Millay) so she can skip over a lot of the broad strokes biographical stuff, but the result is minute details and constant diversions from her own life to theirs and yet I found myself absorbing absolutely nothing about these women or their writing. The whole experience was so uneven and I desperately wished she would've focused on either herself or a more universal concept of spinsterhood instead of trying to bring it all together.