Free Spinster by Kate Bolick

“moving restlessly about the city.”
    A life like that couldn’t have been easy, but at least it was interesting.
    The article went on to report that in 1954 she assumed the sobriquet The Long-Winded Lady and published her first essay under that name, launching a column that would run in the magazine intermittently for the next two decades. At the top of each installment the magazine’s editors would note, with dry mischievousness,“We recently received a letter from the long-winded lady. She wrote as follows.”
    I looked again at the photograph.
    A thrill took hold: the spinster wish made manifest. This is who I wanted to be.
    Later that afternoon I made my daily pass by the “free table,” where extra books were tossed for anyone who might want them, and I was surprised to see hers among the offerings. My habit was to linger for a while, killing time, but now I grabbed the book and hurried back to my desk and began, hungrily, to read.
    Once again, there I was—in her pages and not just her face. Not the me who rode the subway to work with R each morning or made dinner with him at night. It was the me beneath all that, the solitary self I hadn’t been able to access or articulate ever since—well, ever. I’d written one or two poems that got within shouting distance of that self, and certainly I’d felt her power when competing in a race. Mostly, though, it was an amorphous form of consciousness, sensed but never spoken. Reading Brennan’s words, this inner self flickered to the surface.
    You know how a text message can impart an uncanny sense of intimacy merely by arriving at the most mundane moment—while you’re shopping for new sneakers or waiting for a friend in a restaurant? This is how Maeve’s essays reached me, though in reverse: dispatches from one woman’s private experiences of public places. By recording her observations from that shoe store, or restaurant table, she disclosed the significance of seemingly fleeting experiences, the way a poem can, but with a clarity and accessibility that struck me as far more useful and, therefore, generous. The poetry of everyday life, you could say, but in essay form.
    To write a sentence, then a paragraph, then another, and to have someone else read those lines and immediately understand what I meant to express—I wanted to try to do that.
    That year, 1998, was the height of the memoir boom, evidence of which streamed through the office on a daily basis, some of it compelling, much of it horrible. But even at its very best, when a woman was able to present herself with honesty and intelligence, her experience was inextricably bound to the people around her, as if her story didn’t exist apart from theirs. It was different for men; they knew how to present themselves as singular agents, even heroes.
    Maeve was the first woman I’d ever read who wrote about herself not in relation to someone else—whether lover, husband, parent, child. She simply walked around New York City alone, watching. Her point of view was as clear and contained as an ice cube.
    Walking through Washington Square Park, she watches a couple on a bench fighting, just before dawn. From a hotel room many floors up, she watches an old woman dropping a letter out the window, one page at a time. On the A train, a man offers her his seat; she politely refuses and then spends the rest of the ride anxiously regretting her refusal—here, of course, she is watching herself.
    That last one was my favorite. I’d always been daunted by New York City, cloaking my provinciality in smug disinterest, as if the small towns of my close acquaintance were world enough. Brennan’s short scene on the subway was a chink in the great wall of my resistance, and when I peered through I saw that New York wasn’t merely the dense, brutal megalith I’d feared, but also an unpredictable, infinite chain of human interactions, each a