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Read These in Blissful Freedom from Matrimania
Let's start a list of great books about singles
Posted March 11, 2010
Oscars and Razzies, move over. It's time for the Singles Book Awards. For this great suggestion, I owe my thanks to Laurie in Ithaca. She sent me this query:
Hi Bella, I would love to read some fiction, contemporary or otherwise, that gloriously depicts the life of someone who is enjoying themselves, fully engaged, life full of people, and not focused on getting married or saving a marriage. Perhaps it could even have the theme of how marriage can work to limit a life by closing down opportunities to really get to know many different people. How without the consideration of a deeply tied in partner someone might be freer to pursue a path than they otherwise might. Stuff like that.
I'm always looking for fiction that is not matrimaniacal, so I think Laurie's request for suggestions is a fabulous one. So, to everyone out there, do you have any suggestions? Also, if you know any voracious readers or literature majors or professors or anyone else who may have some nominations, it would be great if you would forward this post to them.
Way back in 2008, after an author sent me her mystery that featured a wonderful friendship between two single women, I asked Living Single readers to send me their nominations for literature featuring singles. Hereby demonstrating that your brilliant comments live on for years, here's what you said then.
1. From Cindy Taren:
From the short novel, "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson, the characters Ruth and her Aunt Sylvie - best literary female singles. I urge everyone (especially women) to read this book.
And best literary male single - Henry David Thoreau of course (he was actually a real person who made himself a great literary figure)
2. From our friend Lisa at Onely:
I am embarrassed to say that I can't think of many books offhand that highlight female friendships explicitly. So then, frustrated (I am getting my Ph.D. in English, after all!), I took a look at my bookshelf and found at least one, a memoir written by Ann Patchett about her friendship with writer Lucy Grealy, called Truth and Beauty. It won lots of acclaim and is specifically about their friendship. I have also heard that Toni Cade Bambara writes about female friendships a lot, as does Zora Neale Hurston, so those might be other "literary" authors to check out. As for other authors/scholars who value friendship, you might want to check out Adrienne Rich, bell hooks (not 100% sure this is a subject of inquiry for her), and Audre Lorde...
Over at Onely, I've written a couple of posts about this phenomenon that you (and your readers!) might find interesting: http://onely.org/2008/07/22/female-friendships-and-being-onely/ and http://onely.org/2008/07/02/un-onely-pop-songs-part-1-of-8593-measuring-...
3. Living Single readers may also remember my three-part interview with the brilliant and fearless Jaclyn Geller. In Part 2, I asked for her reading recommendations. She's a literature professor, and reached all the way back to antiquity for her recommendations. You can read them in her response to my second question here.
4. My suggestion for some intriguing single characters is Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Prodigal Summer. It is one of those books I started reading because I like the author, only to discover that it was also full of some great insights about single life. Two examples come from the character Lusa, who was widowed very young:
"Lusa had been amazed at how quickly her status had changed: being single made her either invisible or dangerous. Or both, like a germ. She'd noticed it even at the funeral, especially among the younger ones, wives her own age who needed to believe marriage was a safe and final outcome."
"She [Lusa] understood with some chagrin that she'd accepted the family's judgment of Jewel as a child and not a woman, simply because she was manless."
5. Finally, I'd like to share a brief excerpt from Singled Out, that is very much in the spirit of Laurie's question. References are in the book.
EXCERPT FROM SINGLED OUT, pages 260-261:
The essayist Vivian Gornick once described her reflections upon turning the last page of a novel she had been reading:
"I'd thought it a fine piece of work, resonant with years of observation about something profound, but it struck me as a small good thing, and I remember sitting with the book on my lap wondering, Why only a small good thing? Why am I not stirred to a sense of larger doings here?"
The novelist, Gornick concluded, sold herself and her characters short by accepting unquestioningly the transformative power of romantic love. When the married woman in the novel faces that "crucial moment when she's up against all that she has, and has not, done with her life," she believes that love is the answer. The character's quest for erotic passion, her "yearning to dive down into feeling and come up magically changed," is what made the novel a small good thing instead of something truly big and bold and beautiful and new. The woman in the story sought romance in an affair, but the novel would have been just as diminished if she had looked to a first love or a second marriage as the way to understand her life, redeem it, or fill it with meaning.
Novels that are constructed around romantic love, Gornick believes, are leaning on convention and nostalgia, rather than standing upright on the sturdier and more ennobling ground of reality and discovery. I think that too uncritical an embrace of the mythology of marriage and singlehood is similarly limiting of the real lives that we lead, regardless of whether we are, or wish to be, single or coupled. If we take seriously the notion that the only good adult life is the one that begins with marriage and continues with children, if we focus so intensively on our sexual partner and our children that we fail to appreciate all of the other people and pursuits that might otherwise brighten our lives, then we have let the mythology of romantic love ask too much of us and too little of us.
[END OF EXCERPT]
Now add your suggestions. Feel free to nominate short stories and other genres as well as novels.
