Sometimes, single is as normal as you're going to get

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, family relations

A South Dakota rancher told me of one of his neighbors, a woman and her mother who were running a substantial spread. He said men didn't tend to stay to long in that family. The latest, the younger woman's husband, was a nice fellow who liked to drive around and "look over the place," but didn't really do much. "She just sorta kept him as a pet until she was done having children," he told me, "then the man went his way." This sort of story underlies Garrison Keillor's tales of "Norwegian bachelor farmers" and their alleged fear of marriage, and his description of Lake Wobegon as a place "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

A similar trend can be seen in The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them. Amy Dickinson's memoir of a life anchored in the very real Freeville, New York focuses on the many women of her family and their tendency to live their lives without men around. Not that they don't get married. The marriages just don't seem to last. But the women last; they survive, they prevail, and they mostly raise their kids alone…alone, that is, if you ignore the close-knit web of mother, aunts, sisters, and female cousins that sustains each of them. The author describes the frequent get-togethers as "continued conversations that started decades ago."

A few of the marriages do last. One great-aunt and her husband had been together almost seventy years by the time the author's daughter began college. A few others had hung together, enough to give a ray of hope to the women on occasion.

This is mostly a story of Amy Dickinson's life as a single mother: more than fifteen years raising a toddler to young womanhood, then seeing her off to college. She had picked a man with little real interest in being a father, and only a passing interest in being married. Once he left, she prevailed, as her mother had. When her own father simply wandered off one day (Amy was twelve), her mother had to support the family. When the youngest went to college, the mother went also, eventually becoming a college professor. She's the first to admit that, had her husband stayed around, she'd still be living in a trailer, living on the edge of poverty. Amy prevailed by becoming a gifted writer and speaker. If you've heard of her, it may be because she has been "the new Ann Landers" for some five years now, and is heard on various NPR programs.

This is also a memoir of the author's daughter Emily. Though the two women have quite different temperaments, they attained a comfortable, friendly relationship that must be the envy of many a mother with a rebellious daughter. Though the author presents herself as a bit of a panicky worry-wart, she has managed to gather the composure to take a few risks, such as turning down the first writing job that was offered her, for it was a higher-stress position than she cared for, even though she desperately needed the money. She was soon offered a more suitable job, and managed to bypass much of the "pay your dues" work entailed in the normal path to the title of Columnist.

Emily has this kind of composure in spades. Single moms struggle to shield their children from the unpleasant realities of "broken homes." Though Amy tried dating a few times while raising her, she shied away from prospect after prospect. In this she was wiser than many, who risk their children's well-being by getting re-involved rather too quickly. Emily took all this in stride. When, after Emily had been away at college for a little while, Amy re-connected with a man she'd known "for ages", who was now also single, Emily's response was "Hubba, hubba!"

This isn't Lake Wobegon. Amy, having become one of the strong women, is ready to take a man, not as a pet, nor as a dominator, but as a partner. It seems she isn't nearly so panicky any more.