The writer who forged the path for a glamorous solo existence
BOOK REVIEW | Marjorie Hillis is a pioneer of her time
Marjorie Hillis, I’m afraid, would have shaken her head with disdain at my misspent decade as a Live-Aloner. That’s the phrase Hillis coined in her 1936 bestseller instructing women on the finer points of creating a glamorous solo existence. Hillis’s single ladies were to own several pairs of silk pajamas, keep a well-stocked liquor cabinet and find a sun-soaked pied-a-terre in which they could regularly entertain their fellow bon vivants.
I, on the other hand, lived in a walk-up with blank walls, bland carpeting, and a refrigerator stocked exclusively with eggs and three types of cheese. I spent more nights than I can count watching reality television and consuming whole canisters of aerosol whipped cream. I did host the members of my book club once, but I had to make an Ikea run to buy furniture so they’d have somewhere to sit.
Yet here is where Hillis and I meet: We both relished the experience. But in the early 2000s there was nothing even remotely shocking about me, a professional woman in her 20s, living alone. And perhaps I have Hillis to thank for that.
Author Joanna Scutts unearths and celebrates Hillis’s mostly forgotten contributions in her new book, “The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.” Long before Kate Bolick or Helen Gurley Brown came on the scene, Hillis was proclaiming that not only can women live alone, but they can do so with elegance, financial independence and tremendous joy.
And to Hillis, the recipe for this experience was simple: “The basis of successful living alone is determination to make it successful,” she wrote in her breakout book, “Live Alone and Like It.”
Scutts’s account of Hillis’s life is a scholarly work, thick with biographical details and historical context. And because of that, I was tremendously grateful that Scutts leavened the tome with some compelling first-person narrative. In the introduction we learn that Scutts first encountered Hillis as she neared the end of her doctoral program (during which she could hardly afford New York rent without roommates) and as she mourned the sudden death of her father. A friend brought over a vintage copy of “Live Alone and Like It,” and the wine flowed as they pored over Hillis’s answers to pressing questions such as,
“Is it permissible for a youngish unchaperoned woman living alone to wear pajamas when a gentleman calls?”
“Despite my proud skepticism for anything that could be labeled self-help, I found myself devouring the whole book, and taking its lessons quietly to heart,” Scutts confesses.
I was glad for her honest affection for her subject and found myself caring more about Hillis because of it. Scutts frames Hillis as both a pioneer and a product of her time, rising out of the Great Depression with other aspirational peddlers of the American Dream, including Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie.
But Hillis also made clear that single life might not be her readers’ actual aspiration. She was writing for women who, for whatever reason, find themselves living in a state of “solitary refinement,” if only “now and then between husbands.”
Scutts does an impressive job tracking Hillis’s life, from a pastor’s daughter to a columnist, magazine editor and career-loving author, and establishing her bona fides as a groundbreaking voice in championing women’s self-sufficiency. And doing it with wit and verve.
“The Extra Woman” contextualizes Hillis with other advice-givers and feminists of the 20th century who framed modern thinking about women’s place in society. As helpful as this was from a historical standpoint, I’ll admit that during the long departures from Hillis, I occasionally found my mind wandering. I wanted to know more about Hillis’s personality, personal life and romantic liaisons.
Hillis did finally get married, at age 49, to a wealthy grocery store baron and to cries of hypocrisy from newspapers that had followed America’s most famous Live-Aloner like a minor celebrity. And Hillis’s notes from cohabitation are no advertisement for the creative boon of wedded bliss: In a 1940 letter, she wrote that she was still “in a non-writing mood” that she hoped “wouldn’t prove to be a permanent part of matrimony.”
In fact, Hillis didn’t write seriously again until she became a widower after 10 years of marriage. Then, in 1951, she published a bookend guide for the older Live-Aloner called “You Can Start All Over.” She was single again, back to the days of “earning my own martinis” and with no intention of seeking another husband. Of marriage, she wrote, “There is no more compensating job in the world when you do it for the right man, but there is a limit to the number of times you can do a complete remodeling job on anything, yourself included.”
Hear, hear, Ms. Hillis! Because of course, the real glory of living alone is neither the silk pajamas nor the unfettered access to aerosol whipped topping.
It’s the freedom to simply be — and read and think and explore — on your own.
No remodel necessary. (Unless your book club is coming and you don’t own chairs.)
Scutts should feel proud that she did what she set out to do: return Hillis to her rightful place in the pantheon of women who made it possible for the rest of us to enjoy that freedom. “Recovering the spirit of daring that defined the Live-Alone heyday can remind us that a different story is always possible,” Scutts writes, “and might just inspire us anew, to resist and rebel against convention, and to fight to create the life we really want.”
Here’s hoping every reader has the chance to do just that.
THE EXTRA WOMAN
How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It
By Joanna Scutts
Liveright
335 pp. $27.95
