The Spinster Diaries

February 15, 2020
An anxious Hollywood writer journals about her obsession with 18th-century novelist Frances Burney to help make sense of her life as a self-declared spinster. Written in a series of stream-of-consciousness diary entries, the novel follows an unnamed Hollywood writer in her late 30s who has recently been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. She is anxiety-ridden over both her prognosis and her new TV-writing job alongside a bevy of 20-something women whom she considers part of a "GirlWorld" to which she has no entry (membership seems to be based mostly on the fact that they have a penchant for wearing $400 stilettos to work and have active social lives). In response, she takes up Journaling for Anxiety(TM) and focuses on writing a miniseries following the life of Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction. The novel's setting in 2006 does little to add to the reading experience and unnecessarily dates the text. Many modern readers will cringe at the heroine's constant negative comments toward her own plus-size body and her continual insistence that she's "not like other girls" as well as the repeated references to controversial director Woody Allen and his films. But Fattore's lightning-fast prose shines when she spotlights the parallels between Burney's life and that of her heroine--struggles with anxiety, lack of successful romantic relationships, career highs and lows--and in the moments of true self-reflection that break through the heroine's daily malaise. When she eventually comes to the realization that the biggest difference between her early 20s and late 30s is that she's lost a sense of hope, it's easy to empathize with her fear that her best years are behind her. A humorous and heartfelt look at the expectations women have lived with, and triumphed over, across the centuries.

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