Donna Ward - She I Dare Not Name: A spinsters meditations on life

Woven as finely as a spinsters yarn, this clear-eyed, refined examination of female solitude is poetic, profound and rich in revelation for those who choose to live and think deeply. Caroline Baum, author of Only

Reading She I Dare Not Name is like encountering a place of total stillness in a world of incessant, incoherent clamour. Disarmingly intimate, immense in its implication, intellectually peripatetic, it is a remarkable, profound, even necessary book. James Bradley, author of Clade

She I Dare Not Name is a rollercoaster ride, like life, that takes us deep into a womans experience. It enriched me, leaving me with much to think about. Donna is frank and generous, analytical in a way that makes her story our story any human will find themselves in there. Susan Wyndham, author and former literary editor at the Sydney Morning Herald

This is a beautiful book. Donna Ward has weaved her personal story of a life of solitude with Australian pictures, big and small, and made it relevant to all of us. George Megalogenis, author of The Australian Moment

Donna Ward writes precisely without ever losing her poetry, and poetically without ever losing her precision. These essays are deeply thoughtful and beautifully crafted, and show us that life is woven across time, rather than drawn as a line. This book fills a space most of the world didnt even know was there. It will find its kindred spirits and mean a great deal to them. For many of us, it will give us the jolt we need to recalibrate our thinking about what it means to be single. Nick Earls, author of Zigzag Street and The Wisdom Tree

Donna Ward has written a very powerful manuscript on a lifetime of singlehood. It is intelligent, emotive, imaginative, and contains lightness among the bravely rendered darkness and loneliness. Angela Meyer, author of Joan Smokes

A Spinsters Meditations? The words are not encouraging. But the book is a sheer delight. Wise and funny and wistful. Donna Ward is one of those rare creaturesa writer who can actually write. Phillip Adams, journalist, broadcaster and author

Something rich and brave. William Yeoman, journalist and former literary editor, The West Australian

With a devastatingly clear-eyed honesty, the word Ward dares to name is spinster, and this meditative collection of essays spin their own spell, making a deep dive into the world of female solitude in all its guises. She lays it out like a calm tarot reading: feminism, courage, silence, loneliness, grief, recovery and the power of the generative idea, as well as all the labels that come with carving out your own path of self-definition and self-determination. A book like a long quenching drink of water on the history of a gendered concept, with a fair bit of life packed in along the way. Cate Kennedy, author of The World Beneath

First published in 2020

Copyright Donna Ward 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers at the address below.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 629 6

eISBN 978 1 76087 351 6

Set by Post Pre-press, Australia

Cover design: Sandy Cull, www.sandycull.com

Cover image: Shutterstock

for Brendan

Reader Beware: All names and identifying characteristics have been changed. Certain events have been rearranged and some characters and scenes are composites in order to respect everyones privacy, including my own, while maintaining the essential truth of my life.

Some will say things didnt happen the way I remember them, and they are right. We experience the same events differently. These meditations include remembrances structured to give insight into what was once a rare life. I write about what happened, or mostly didnt happen, in a life that is different from the main.

The unspoken story within these pages is the estrangement between my sister and me. The matter is delicate and, while it renders me more nakedly alone than most, the intricacies of it are not relevant to the subject at handthat is, what it is like to be single.

Contents

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 havent 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 wont 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 says they will look forward to it. Each says 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 havent noticed the change. They are in the rivers 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. Shes 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.