In search of new stories, I was drawn to Diane di Prima’s 2001 memoir, “Recollections of My Life as a Woman.” It focuses on her childhood and life in New York – a portrait of the artist as a young woman, in all her romantic and intuitive glory. Ms. di Prima is notable for being a poet in her early twenties in 1950s New York, she decided she wanted to be a mother, and then a single mother.
“I was a poet,” she wrote, continuing, “There was nothing I could ever experience, like a human being in a female body, that I would not experience…. There would, it seemed to me, be no quarrel. should be between these two goals: having a baby and being a poet.” Nevertheless, she continued: “A conflict held me.”
Her memoir revolves around this conflict between motherhood and the demands of an artist. At one point, overwhelmed by the demands of raising children alone while running a press, she founded an avant-garde theater, protecting her left-wing friends from FBI raids and the glaring poverty of an artist’s life in New York City, Mrs. di Prima entered into a marriage of convenience with a man she distrusted. He was the ex-boyfriend of her male best friend. Aside from its messy origins, this relationship resembles the dream I’ve heard so many straight women describe, joking, not joking – wanting to start a family with a friend, to avoid the complications of romantic love.
But Ms. di Prima is honest about the scheme’s limitations. She wrote that she avoided the pain of romance, but the man she married is still a dominant, abusive mess, in her stories. In addition, in the marriage she has lost something of herself. “One of my most precious and prized possessions was my independence: my struggle for control over my own life,” she wrote, continuing, “I failed to see that it had intrinsic value to anyone, that it was a currency that was only but precious inside the empire, a currency that could not cross borders.”
When I read them, these words sounded to me like the sound of a tuning fork. I had never read such an accurate description of what marriage is asking some people to give up. Those who are freaking out about the proliferation of single Americans fail to see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independence—lives that still come together with a community, with a home, with a belief in something bigger than yourself. The people who cling to old tales of bachelorhood and marriage cannot yet see these lives for what they are, because, as Mrs. di Prima puts it, they are not an ‘objectively valuable good’. Their meaning is “a currency that cannot cross borders”.
These lives threaten current communal narratives. But what is a threat to some may be a glimpse of a new world to come for others.