Women Writers and Solitude

Should we lock the door or open it?

I’m staying for a month in the town of Gullane, on the Firth of Forth (a large inlet from the North Sea), outside of Edinburgh. It is a gorgeous town, with a beautiful stretch of unspoiled beach.

The Solitude of Writing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a topic that affects all writers and that is particularly thorny for women writers: solitude. It’s been on my mind because my life over this past year while I’ve been moving around Europe has been most of the time very solitary. That is the biggest adjustment I’ve had to make—that I’m still making—after 20 years of marriage and motherhood.

There were so many times as a wife, mother, and professor that I craved time alone. I yearned for a writer’s retreat and dreamed of a Walden Pond of my own. While I didn’t head out for periods of solitude until my daughter was nearly 18, I realize now that some of my best—and most productive—times have been when she was younger and I could divide my days between motherhood and solitude for writing.

I look back fondly on those years that I had grants to write my books. I am forever grateful to the National Endowment for Humanities for allowing me to step away from teaching and work on my books full-time. What that looked like was about 6 hours of intense productivity during the day, while my daughter was at school. Then at 3:30 or 4:30 I would pick her up and bring her to soccer practice or straight home. Either way, the part of my brain that had been focused on my writing shut down, and the part that was focused on my daughter would switch on. There was this tremendous balance in my life as I toggled between writer and mother, a balance that kept me from leaning too far in one direction or the another.

I don’t have that balance anymore. There is no one in my life to pull me out myself, to give me a break from the mental work that takes up most of my day. Some days I’ll have a zoom call with a coaching client or a call with a friend or family member. But often I don’t. And on those days it can be difficult to stay focused on my writing, because I know that I have all day to do it. As a result, I can slip out of it easily and let myself get distracted by all that the internet has to offer.

Of course, solitude is the natural state of the writer. She cannot commit her heart and mind to the page without it. And it seems the more solitude she has, the deeper she can go, the better writer she can become.  

I recently opened May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, and I find it interesting that in the very first paragraph she is both identifying the virtue of solitude and qualifying it:

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

In other words, May Sarton is saying that alone time and togetherness enrich each other. We need both to thrive, even as writers.

May Sarton at her desk, from The Paris Review

Solitude as Revolutionary

I’ve also been thinking about how a woman writing and delving into her own mind is quite a revolutionary thing—because she is taking the huge chunks of time that writing a book requires away from what has historically been her “sphere,” namely domestic work, raising a family, caring for elderly parents, volunteering for her neighborhood, church, or children’s schools. A woman’s “sphere” has also included (and may still include in many cases) the job of assisting her husband in his work—like typing up his books and editing them, as so many literary wives have done, instead of doing their own work. And if not something that tangible, then certainly supporting her spouse’s career in other ways, like being the one who holds the fort down while the other one works late or travels for work.

This issue of time to one’s self seems to be one of the trickiest for women writers. To claim, “I am a writer,” and “I’m going to write now,” while shutting the door or going to stay in a hotel (as Maya Angelou did) or renting a cabin (as Greta Gerwig did when she wrote the Little Women script), is probably the most unconventional, unwomanly thing a woman can do.

Women are still encouraged to live primarily for others, rather than themselves. We may tell young women to go to college, maybe do postgraduate work, and establish yourself in a career, but then what? If you want a family, you must give over not only your body but also your time and your solitude. Women still bear the primary burden of parenting and the time-consuming emotional, physical, and mental labor it requires.

A friend sent me recently this devastating piece by the poet Maggie Smith. She was caught in an incredibly disempowering marriage in which she did all of the labor of holding her family together and trying to squeeze in writing time, while her husband did next to nothing. Now she’s written a bestselling memoir about it. I’ve read part of it and didn’t continue for some reason or other. It wasn’t my cup of tea at that moment, maybe because reading the story of her giving everything to her family only to have her husband strike up an affair with a woman in another town was so frustrating to read. Interestingly, now that the marriage is over, she has become quite a productive writer, it seems.

My Struggles with Solitude

Below is an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress about my year of travel in search of a new life as a writer. This excerpt, from the first month of my trip, is about my struggles with solitude while at the Dora Maar House in Provence. I was there for a writing residency, and although I say I wasn’t writing, I was writing a lot in my journal. They say that no matter how far away from home you go, your baggage comes with you. And if you are alone, it’s impossible to ignore it. I have been able to release a lot of mine through journal writing. Now my journal is the very raw material out of which my memoir is growing.

(If you haven’t read my letter about Dora Maar, it will help to know that she had a ten-year affair with Picasso and then lived alone for the rest of her life, spending part of each year at this house in Menerbes.)

Dora Maar with her art, wearing some fabulous slippers, from Art News

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[Beginning of Excerpt]

I read about Dora’s solitary life, trying to get inside it, wanting desperately to believe that she wasn’t as lonely and sad as everyone assumes she was.

I’ve spent too much time alone. I don’t want to become her. Am I going to become her? Will the rest of my life be a sad footnote to my failed marriage? This is the static in my head, a steady hum always in the background.

A writer’s life is whole lot of solitude. Do I have that in me? Here I’ve been trying to be a writer for a few weeks and I have nothing but false starts and journal entries and notes about Dora Maar to show for it. And even in this vast beautiful house with views that make you sigh from every window I can't stand the solitude.

My original plan for a new life was to buy a house in the French countryside. But this is what I feared. Too much time alone, in my own head.

This was Dora’s life. For fifty years. I can’t get over that—FIFTY years. She escaped into her art. Did she find peace there?

Over the past ten years, I’ve escaped into my book projects, finding refuge from my soulless marriage. But I didn’t live there all the time. I would bring my daughter to school in the morning, work for 5-6 hours, straight through lunch, and then pick her up at 3:30. After that, I was a mom. I forgot about my work, I came out of my head and into her life. It was the balance that carried me through.

Now there is no balance. I’m tipping over into something. What is it? A kind of madness?           

In my solitude I have absurd thoughts. 

While I’m brushing my teeth: I haven’t felt a man’s touch in over a year, the touch of desire even longer. I’ve been a nun for years. Without even the consolation Dora had of God or Jesus for a lover.

As I’m washing dishes: Should I just go on Tinder, like the American writer in Paris told me to?

When I pass the large mirror in my room: No more wine and bread for you. You’re going to turn into a dumpy old lady. You already are one.

When I lay in bed at night: I bet my old German boyfriend who told me he wanted to restart his life with me is now having sex with his wife, the wife he said “didn’t fit” him.

In the late afternoon, after another morning of not writing, I force myself to go out, even though I don’t feel like trying to speak French. As soon as the locals hear how bad my French is, they look past me, not at me. I’m a visitor, and in Menerbes we are like weeds, sprouting everywhere.

I go to the epicerie and sit down at one of the tables outside. Of the four tables along the store’s facade one other is occupied, by a couple about my age. He is drinking a beer, she an orange soda. When the shop owner comes, I order some tea. There is no recognition in her eyes, although I’ve been here a few times already.

There isn’t much activity in Menerbes in the afternoons. Lunch is over. People go home to rest or go back to work. There aren’t as many tourists around. Maybe they’ve all wandered up the hill to the church.

When the man and woman begin to speak to each other, I stiffen. My stomach seizes. They’re German. I feel trapped, I want to flee. But I’ve already ordered.

They look about my age. I’ve seen lots of couples in their fifties and sixties walking around town. Their kids have left home, and they’re free to take romantic getaways, just the two of them. They have found something worth staying together for. I try not to hate them.

Sometimes, I see couples sitting in silence, looking everywhere but at each other, nothing to say anymore. But not today. This couple keeps up a constant, private chatter, not loud enough for me to hear what they are saying, but loud enough so I know they still have plenty to say to each other.

Something heavy like a large ball of black tar settles in my stomach. What is it: Jealousy? Rejection? Not being loved? Feeling unlovable? 

Let’s just call it a nauseating concoction of the shittiest feelings about yourself. I know it well. It’s been a regular visitor over the past year and a half.

I get out my journal and start to write. Hello self-loathing, my old friend. Welcome back!

I’m frustrated to still be feeling this way. When will it end? Why am I still feeling this? Is this what my year of traveling solo is going to be like?

I watch the couple, contented in their twoness, walk toward the parking lot on the edge of the village. I finish my tea and walk back to Dora’s big, empty house.

I make dinner in the deserted kitchen. I open a new bottle of rosé and enjoy a cold, crisp glass while I cook.

When my roasted rosemary chicken with potatoes and onions is ready, I sit down at the kitchen table, which could easily seat three more. I drink another glass of wine and read about Dora while I eat.

Afterwards, I have another glass with some creamy St. Felician cheese. When did I start having cheese for dessert?

[End of excerpt]

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I hope you’re enjoying reading my letters. If you are, why not share then with a friend who might also enjoy them.

Until next time,

Anne