Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick is my choice for Week 3 - a Goodreads Choice Award 2015 winner or nominee. It was nominated for Best Memoir & Autobiography .

“Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence.”

So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why­ she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried.

This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.

Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savour."

After reading Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari , this book worked for me in showing me similar ideas from a female perspective. I'm 31, and settling down with my boyfriend, with the probability of marriage and children in my near future. I found this made me think about WHY I wanted those things, and if I wanted them for the right reasons.

What I was enjoyed the most, however, was exploring the lives of the different female writers Kate Bolick discovered, their personal relationships, and how they affected their ability to write novels, poetry, etc. This was the first book I can remember where I was highlighting passages which spoke to me.

I feel like I have accidentally stumbled across a gem of a book, which I can see myself coming back to in 10, 20, 30 years from now for a re-read.

This looks interesting. Unusual subject and one which needs to be more addressed I think, because people are often culturaly narrow minded as soon as you're not part of the "2+2" in your thirties.