Kate Bolick’s Spinster is an excavation of single womanhood in America. I enjoyed the book (for the most part), and I’m glad I read it (finally). It is an ambitious project – weaving together personal history and anecdotes with the country’s history and also the lives of five women who influenced the author’s life and ended up single – but Bolick handles it well overall.
I loved the profiles of the five women who influenced her life, and I loved reading about how they did so. I enjoyed all the historical aspects of the book and the discussion about what being single has meant for women throughout the history of our country until the present. I was expecting more of a traditional memoir, and while I enjoy memoir well enough, that it did not turn out to be Bolick‘s primary focus was a pleasant surprise.
With a subtitle like “Making a Life of One’s Own,” I expected to see more of that. Most of the memoir portion focused on other people. While I can appreciate that there will be significant others (romantic or otherwise) in anybody’s life and that a memoir will inevitably include some mention of them, the key word there is “some.” Not constant mention. Interdependence and independence are two different things. I was disappointed not to see more discussion about independence. There’s more to it than whether or not one is involved in a romantic relationship. The focus on all the men she’s dated and why they worked or didn’t work or ultimately worked but they broke up anyway was exhausting and felt extraneous. It’s this very focus on discussing who women are in the context of relationships to romantic partners (instead of focus on women as actual people on their own, regardless of romantic relationship or lack thereof) that is the root cause of the double standard for men and women regarding marriage. Parts of the book seemed to reinforce that double standard rather than break it down, which I had hoped would be the point of the book.
I enjoyed the book overall, and I’m happy to have read it. I’m not quite sure it was a successful reclamation of the word Spinster, but maybe it was a start.
Disclaimer: I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.
M. Suzanne Terry 
I can understand how one might get side-tracked when writing a memoir. My subtitle is about finding love again, but I have a lot in it about sorting through baggage, being single, and striving for independence. (Sort of the opposite of what you describe in Spinster.) Your review impresses the importance of not straying too far from from the title and subtitle.
That’s it exactly – I want the book to match what it promises. From your memoir, for example, I would expect (and rampantly enjoy) the in-depth discussion of your relationship. It makes sense that the other elements are secondary. Not so much with Spinster. I would expect more celebration (and possibly even a little how-to) of her independence.
There’s plenty about the relationship. I’ve wondered about the amount of family of origin baggage I’ve included – stuff we needed to work through before we would be ready to meet again. Something to consider if I ever do a revision. We’ll see. 🙂