Journal of a Solitude
1973
- fiction, general
- solitude
- diaries
- american authors
- biography
- american poets
- american women authors
- sarton, may, 1912-1995
- lgbtq biography and memoir
The story
"I am here alone for the first time in weeks," May Sarton begins this book, "to take up my 'real' life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love,are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore what is happening or what has happened." In this journal, she says, "I hope to break through into the rough, rocky depths,to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there."
What it’s like
Quiet, unhurried, and wholly interior, this book reads like sitting at a kitchen table in a Maine house while the light moves across the floor and the day stretches out with nothing demanded of it. Sarton writes in a first-person diary voice that is candid, precise and often tender, with close attention to small domestic things: the garden, the weather off the water, a cup of tea going cold, the sound of her own thoughts becoming clearer as she writes. Entries are short and loosely dated, so the book is easy to dip into and pleasant to read in fragments, over several sittings or in a single unbroken afternoon. The emotional register is reflective and melancholy without being bleak, moving between contentment in aloneness and the ache of longing for companionship and love. Its arc is one of a woman slowly testing what solitude gives her and what it costs, and the self-examination is frank about anger, fear and desire. Intensity is low: no violence on the page beyond emotional turbulence, and no graphic content. It suits a rainy Sunday, a quiet evening alone, or a slow reread, and is for readers who want intimate, honest reflection on creative life, loneliness and self-knowledge.
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