Book extract

Extract: She I Dare Not Name by Donna Ward

Donna Ward’s new memoir She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life is a compelling memoir about the single life and the courage to live alone in a world made for couples and families.

Winter’s Road For Jamie I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or life in the Woods, 1854 It is an ice-split of a winter. 1992. A Sunday afternoon in the middle of it. I am in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne. I am with friends. The sun shines obliquely through the windows of the Turquoise Cafe. Clustered around wooden tables, we sit on roughly painted old school chairs. Red, blue, green. My friends and I laugh, drink coffee. I order a cappuccino and an escargot. Some of us have whisky to keep the cold from our veins. We meet here on Sundays. We have been meeting here for years. It is so good to be in company. I haven’t spoken since Friday afternoon. I expect some of us will carry on afterward. We usually do. Go to a movie, a play, a flamenco bar. As we chat, each person says they won’t meet up for the next couple of weeks. School holidays. Even those without children are going away. Up north. To escape the cold. I order a whisky. In time my friends peel away into the evening. Fondly, they take their leave. We will reconvene in three weeks’ time. Each say they will look forward to it. Each say it is good to have such a group of friends. See you on the flip side, the last friend says as he departs. I sit with my whisky for a while, deliberately take in the incontrovertible truth of my life. My landscape has changed. Now everything stops during the school holidays. Choir. Dream group. Yoga. Even I pause my

psychotherapy practice, since most people want the break. I am thirty-eight, a similar age to my friends. We laugh the same, have work that inspires us the same, but I am no longer the same. They have partners, some have children, I have neither. My friends haven’t noticed the change. They are in the river’s flow. Now, Sunday gatherings stop during school holidays. Soon they will stop altogether, when family life takes off in earnest. I open the door into my bluestone cottage, into solid cold. The paint is frozen smooth on the plaster. My shoe leather is hard, it leaks heat from my socks, from my feet. The carpet almost crackles beneath my shoes. The light switch tinkles like icicles on a wire. I turn on the oil heater, pour another whisky. Warm my blood. I ring Mum. She’s back in Western Australia, where I grew up. No answer. Probably out with her new partner. Here, in the middle of winter, silence, as ever, has the last word. I turn on the television, slip into slippers, curl on the satin couch, drape the throw rug over myself and the oil heater to get warm. Everything in my world is in order. I have had an uninterrupted weekend to make it so. Two weeks of unplanned solitude stretch before me to the horizon. Everyone I know and love is engaged in a continuing narrative of domesticity, responsibilities and obligations. The foundational paragraphs of the life I, too, set out to get. I watch an American sitcom to kindle my spirit. I weep. That is the last family sitcom I will watch for decades. The gates have closed. I am beyond the balance of intimacy and solitude and deep, deep in the territory of she I dare not name. I am spinster. I stand in grief and loneliness, the fractured paragraphs of a discontinued narrative. Grief over what was and is now gone, over what I was convinced would come, for me. Wrapped in the isolation of a foreigner, the enormity of my solitude is incomprehensible to others. As far beyond their imagination as it was beyond mine only hours ago. My

words are the same, but my language wholly different. When I speak of my life, my words are translated as ingratitude for the solitude everyone desires. I am not ungrateful. I am ill equipped and want to talk about it, find a way through it. When I speak of the new landscape of my friendships to others, to my therapist, my friends are labelled inadequate, unfaithful, uncommitted to the friendship. Some say I should get better friends. But my friends are not unfaithful or uncommitted. We love each other. They are simply, and appropriately, otherwise engaged. If I had chosen this life I would be better prepared, I assume. I am not sure. I have never heard from another who has lived this urban solitude. It would be different if I was a desert anchorite, or a cross-legged sadhu sitting with his trident by the mouth of Mother Ganga. There would be rules and rituals to guide me, a scholarship and a community to hold my thread. But the religious life is not my calling. Nor can I say I am called to urban solitude. But here it is, and here I am, progressing through it without a map or a community of understanding. Walking darkly, one step after the other.

She I Dare Not Name is published by Allen & Unwin.