I thought it would be easy to compile a list of books where women live alone. And it was, but what is considerably less easy it to think about books where women live alone and don’t fall into, or emerge from, a completely deranged state. I asked friends, and one replied, “the first thing that came to mind was Marian Engel’s Bear, then I remembered she has sex with a bear.” We then debated whether having sex with a bear disqualified the book from “a novel where a woman living alone isn’t deranged” and we reluctantly decided it did. I’m interested in stories where women in solitude are not abject, feared or discarded.
In my memoir Arrangements in Blue I write about finally making a home for myself, alone, in my early 40s—something I felt might never happen—and while it is an imperfect as any home is on occasion, it is also a state of grace, comfort and the site of my whole creative life.
It pleases me that my list—by accident rather than intent—is formed of books where in solitude women contemplate their relationship to other women (in the main), rather than to men. It’s as though I’ve unwittingly passed a kind of Bedchel test.
Here are 9 novels about women living alone:
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
I always feel a sense of tremendous relief when I read a narrator who isn’t going to have children and is (broadly speaking) ok with that. In Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey, two friends—Laura and Alina—explore their own paths through maternal ambivalence. While Alina pursues motherhood, Laura, who lives alone, encounters motherhood in an entirely different way. The portrayal of Laura’s relationship to motherhood, via being a daughter and her friendships with mothers, are incredibly moving and nuanced. That Laura also lives alone, in apparent contentment other than disturbances from pigeons and the disruptive and compelling lives of others, made the book all the more affecting to read.
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
Jean is an artist who doesn’t need anyone to confer the status of artist upon her. Her home, where she lives alone (other than an occasional, tacitly invited houseguest), is her studio and gallery. She longs to connect to her estranged stepdaughter Leah, and the novel is told in their alternating voices. Jean welds scrap metal together to create towers she embellishes with words and symbols and trinkets. The towers are imposing totems of Jean’s vitality, of all she’s learned from her experiences and from her beloved artists Louise Bourgeoise and Agnes Martin. The novel is uncomfortable and confronting at times, but it is invigorating too. An artist can create themselves at any stage of life and be aflame with artistic intent until the very end.
Drive Your Plough Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
If you live with animals, can you truly say that you live alone? I wonder because while I don’t live with another human, I do share my home with two cats. We live together but I know my little family household won’t be recognised as such by some. Tokarczuk’s protagonist Janina lives in rural Poland and is alone since her two beloved dogs—her “little girls”—disappeared. Her life is further disrupted by the brutal murder of her neighbor. She lives mainly in her kitchen, her “small, cluttered centre of the Universe” where she watches TV, specifically The Weather Channel. Janina describes herself as “made for solitude” but the story is populated by strange, intriguing friends and foes as the search for the killer intensifies. I read feeling as though Janina was never truly alone, except perhaps (in the novel’s realm at least) her “endless sense of mourning for every dead animal,”
Pond by Claire Louise Bennett
Pond is a short story collection that allows you, the reader, to burrow completely into the narrator’s domestic space as though it were a novel. There’s something of the home of Pond I want, a ‘splendid deep wide sill with no wooden overlay, just plastered stone, nice and chilly: the perfect place for a bowl’. There’s porridge with black jam, cleaning the fire grate, there’s bright green parsley on the doorstep outside, neighbours and ratcatchers, a boyfriend, a stir-fry thrown in the bin, a party imagined and realised, shirts to be ironed, coffee drunk from a small noodle bowl, all kinds of weather. Intimate life is described from the alert vantage point of solitude and its pleasures, desires and conflicts are brought into sharp, clarifying focus.
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
Described by one critic as a kind of “ghosted memoir,” the book unfolds over a sequence of 12 chapters, each formed of several immaculate vignettes, told by Sonia, a horse trainer. It’s the sort of book that could be read all in one go; it has a powerful, propulsive energy. But I found myself reading one or two each night, as I would poems. Each sentence is perfectly calibrated, each left me fizzing with my own desire to create. It was almost too much, too potent! I’m obsessed with this book.
Sonia largely lives alone “in a trailer, a motel room, a stall at the track” and sometimes out of her truck. She describes the kind of living environment I would hate, a bedroom that “looked onto a cow pen” and the possibility of waking up to a goat chewing on my sleeve if I left the door open, but Sonia herself is so pulsing with her electric life, her passion for horses and sharp expressiveness, I felt I wanted to live like her, if not with her.
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alammeddine
Aaliya Saleh is a 72-year-old who lives in a Beirut apartment building. She has translated into Arabic 37 books that have never been read by anyone, except for herself before she places them in a box and has her celebratory two glasses of wine. In An Unnecessary Woman she reflects on her life, “I made my bed —a simple, comfortable and adequate bed,” and her life in literature. Divorced, without children and grieving her “one intimate,” Aaliya has led a life that her culture (despite her devotion to it) is not ready for. And at times she battles with it too, confessing that while she has always been bothered not to be like ‘everyone else’ she has at the same time desperately sought to be different. But somehow, she finds that the literature that has given her purpose and companionship might also be the key to transforming her loneliness into something altogether more appealing—solitude that can at last transform and open up to new connections.
Common Decency by Susannah Dickey
Susannah Dickey’s second novel Common Decency is a darkly funny and moving story of neighbors in a Belfast apartment building. Lily is reeling from the death of her mother, unwilling to share her grief less the sharing causes her to lose her experiences in the process. Upstairs, Siobhán is consumed with her affair with a married man called Andrew who has “recalibrated her emotional vocabulary.” Lily displaces all the loss into an obsession with Siobhán, and when Siobhán rejects Lily’s attempts at friendship, Lily’s obsessiveness is propelled into action; she’s no longer content to listen to the sound of Siobhan’s microwave that “squeals like a pig when the food is done.” Dickey is a brilliant poet as well as novelist, and the brutal accuracy of imagery and clever, sharp word-choices showcase her skill. When those skills are used to describe the unguarded, private behavior of women living alone you’ll find yourself wincing and seen with alarming alacrity.
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein
Now that her two adult daughters have moved to Canada to live with their father, Leda is finally free of “the anxiety of having to take care of them,” and free to follow her own desires. In an unusual state of well-being, she leaves the city to spend Summer in a small Italian coastal town. She overcomes the disappointments of arrival to settle into a peaceful routine of “work, daydreams and idleness.” But she begins to observe and feel inconvenienced by a large family of Neapolitans on the beach, who remind her where she came from, invoking both her fascination and disgust. Eventually, her observation turns to what Leda later describes as a gesture of hers that made no sense. It is a novel of brutal reflection, one where Leda’s fear of a love so powerful it might prevent her from becoming herself comes to pass, as she unravels entirely.
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd
In Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, we meet three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. The novel is in two halves, in the first “Breasts,” the three women reunite as Makiko travels to Tokyo in pursuit of breast enhancement surgery. In the second, “Eggs,” set eight years later, we spend time with Natsu as she contemplates growing old alone and pursues her own dream of becoming a mother.
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