There are times you do get lonely.You need a network of friends.You
need to look after your friends.You need to do work that keeps you
in touch with people. I’ve reached a watershed and I want to change
my whole life. There’s a rumour in this building that with these real
estate prices it’ll be sold. For 12 years I’ve never had a decent
relationship. The clincher is that Roger has separated from his 2nd
wife and is being a really good companion.” “Does this mean after all
this time he is beginning to appreciate you?” “Apparently. I had
[friends—long detour about the friends] over here and Roger came
in and Pat said, he’s nice. She wanted him. So I looked at him again.”
“Are you telling me after all this time you are going to end up with
your ex-husband?” “If I don’t end up with him some other woman is
going to grab him. Right now he is talking about how ideal it would be
to get two semi’s side-by-side. I think that would be civilised. I would
become a part-time step-mother. His ex-wife-soon-to-be never
wanted to meet me.” “You mean women know these things?” “There
are all these variables and I have to make a decision. I don’t want the
decision to be caused by this building being sold.”‘Living Alone: The New Spinster (Some Notes)’ (Baranay 1988,
pp. 15–18)This is not a story in the conventional sense. It calls itself ‘notes’ to imply
a loose form which embraces reflections and philosophical musings.
However, it does include narrative elements: there are passages of
dialogue and quotation, short scenarios and ‘flashbacks’ to previous
incidents or conversations. The writer also dramatises and narrativises
herself, for example, sometimes talking to herself in the second person.
So the piece uses some fictional techniques, but is a collection of fragments
which circle round a topic, rather than a directional plot-orientated
story. The fragmented note form allows the writer to create a constella-
tion of ideas which do interconnect. They all relate to rethinking the
notion of the spinster in terms of the liberation a woman might feel from
living on her own. In a bygone social climate, where marriage and
children were supposed to be the solution for all women, the term
‘spinster’ was entirely negative, even pejorative. It used to imply rejec-
tion: a woman who no man had wanted to marry, marriage being the
ultimate goal. Again the inversion/ subversion of form is a means to
explore an alternative identity.
This piece also breaks up genre because it exists halfway between fiction
and autobiography: it is a semi-fictionalised version of the diary form. The
writer is negotiating the contradictions which make up her personal and
social situation. The main contradiction seems to be that she wants to live
The invert, the cross-dresser, the fictocritic 199