The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It

286 Pages·2017·6.7 MB·English

by  Joanna Scutts

THE
EXTRA
WOMAN
HOW MARJORIE HILLIS LED A
GENERATION OF WOMEN TO LIVE ALONE
AND LIKE IT
JOANNA SCUTTS
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York | London
For the Live-Aloners, in fact or in spirit.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Solitary Splendor
2. “Something to Get Your Teeth Into”
3. (Not) A Question of Money
4. Setting for a Solo Act
5. Work Ends at Nightfall
6. Mad About New York
7. Rosie and Mrs. Roulston
8. Starting All Over
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Illustrations
Index
THE
EXTRA
WOMAN
INTRODUCTION
A Room of My Own
L
ong before I read Virginia Woolf’s manifesto, my dreams of the future were
creative and solitary. I had no fantasies about my wedding day, only about my
writing place: a little garret overlooking some scenic rooftops, precise location to
be determined, where nobody, least of all my parents, could come in without
knocking and accidentally banish the muse. I was always, in these dreams, in the
middle of some great creative project, never at the tentative beginning or the
slog-like end, never stuck and procrastinating by looking up pictures of bigger,
better, prettier garrets online. I never particularly worried about how I would
manage the other part of the equation that Woolf lays out, the five hundred a
year or whatever that would be today, in London or Paris or New York or
wherever my room happened to be. The important thing was the room.
I never managed it. I followed my obsession with Woolf and her
Bloomsbury friends to Cambridge, studying and taking my degree alongside the
boys as she could not. There, I lived in a succession of semiprivate rooms,
overlooking first a market square, then the library’s mullioned windows. The
rooms always had shared bathrooms up one flight of stairs and shared kitchens
down another, friends across the hall, and fascinating semistrangers above and
below. I could close my door, but I was never really alone, and it was never
really mine. Next year some other student would put her feet up on my desk,
doze in my armchair, make out on my squeaky single bed, puke in my sink—and
the room would never know the difference. After graduation I kept on sharing
and moving through flats and houses that were always just a rehearsal for that
real space of my own, the magical room that would turn me into a writer.
When I applied to graduate school, I dreamed of a studio—lovely, loaded
word that conjured for me a tiny but magically unfolding place, where an artist
might work and an adult might live. It had to be in New York, of course, despite
the mathematical impossibility of renting my own place on a student stipend in
the middle of an economic bubble. But I made it to the city and spent my
twenties there, single, in apartments that were mine, but never mine alone. There
were summer rentals in Paris and Berlin, a few weeks of making space among a
stranger’s belongings, lying awake as strange pipes clanged and neighbors
fought in other languages, short breaks playing at living alone, tasting the fear
and the dizzying lightness—what can’t I do, what can’t I get away with, if
nobody’s watching?
I was neither gloriously independent nor cozily coupled. Friends got
married and had babies, but I was stuck with a roommate’s cat that peed
determinedly on the couch. I was broke, lonely, and nearing the end of my PhD
program when the 2008 financial panic canceled just about all the jobs for newly
minted English professors. That Christmas, as I was about to graduate, turn
thirty, and start my belated independent life, my father died suddenly of a heart
attack, a month after his sixty-seventh birthday. I went home to London to my
mother and a house full of his books and his unfinished projects, where
everything that could be used as a vase was stuffed with dying flowers.
One evening, my best friend Ali, who knew better than to send yet another
bouquet, came to visit bearing two bottles of supermarket Prosecco and a gift for
my mother and me. It was a burnt-orange hardcover book with stiff, lightly
foxed pages and a title picked out in navy-blue capital letters: LIVE ALONE
AND LIKE IT. For a second that title stung like a slap, as lonely and unmoored
as I felt. But as the three of us drank the wine we began to turn the pages, taking
turns reading snippets aloud, from chapters called things like “A Lady and Her
Liquor” and “Pleasures of a Single Bed,” and the question-and-answer section
“Etiquette for a Lone Female.” (“Question: Is it permissible for a youngish un-
chaperoned woman living alone to wear pajamas when a gentleman calls?”)
Despite my proud skepticism toward anything that could be labeled self-help, I
found myself devouring the whole book, and taking its lessons quietly to heart.
A forgotten bestseller from 1936, Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the
Extra Woman (to give the book its full, even less comforting title) had recently
been reissued with a pale pink dust jacket. Not one to buy anything wrapped in
such blatant chick-lit clothing, Ali had gone online to find this worn, jacketless
original, which bore no more information about the author than her old-
fashioned name: Marjorie Hillis. Her book celebrated guts, indulgence, and
above all, independence; it was funny, brisk, and endlessly quotable. There were
sections on fashion, money, cocktails, travel, and having affairs—all of which
played their part in the practical and adventurous life of the woman the author
nicknamed the “Live-Aloner.” As important and interesting as I found my
graduate work, which focused on the literature and commemoration of World
War I, it was undeniably grimmer than this lighthearted little book, and I was in
no mood to read about mourning. So I started cheating on my dissertation with
Marjorie Hillis.
But this turned out to be harder than I expected. She had left only the
faintest of Internet traces—not even a Wikipedia page—and I could glean little
beyond the fact that she had worked at Vogue in New York, and her book had
been a surprise international hit. My copy, I eventually worked out, was a British
“translation” of the American original, with references to Broadway and the
Metropolitan Museum swapped out for the West End and the National Gallery.
A few crumbs of information led me to archives in Brooklyn and Indiana, where
I pieced together a picture of this plain, pragmatic daughter of a once-famous
Brooklyn preacher. Once an aspiring poet, Marjorie became a magazine editor
and eventually transformed herself into a self-help guru, who elevated the status
of single women from pitiful “extras” into glamorous and self-possessed “Live-
Aloners.” She followed up Live Alone with a series of sequels, mostly out of
print, that covered budgeting, entertaining, New York City, and life as a widow
and solitary senior citizen. There was even an intriguing little book called Work
Ends at Nightfall that turned out to be a long poem about the careers and love
lives of seven female friends in New York.
Despite the charming retro touches, like the insistence that any self-
respecting Live-Aloner ought to own at least four styles of a mysterious garment
called a “bed-jacket,” Marjorie Hillis’s philosophy struck me as almost painfully
relevant to modern single women like me who were balancing the fantasy of
independence with the fear of being alone. Carrie Bradshaw, Bridget Jones, the
girls of Girls, and all their real-life counterparts owed an unspoken debt to
Marjorie Hillis, the original guru of the “extra woman” whose solitude was
nobody’s business but her own. And unlike other stories of single women in
which getting a partner is the end of the story, Live Alone and Like It was