there are two dishonest stories about living alone, and may sarton wrote the book that refuses both. the first story is the sad one: the solitary life as failure's waiting room, the empty house as proof nobody chose you. the second is the radiant one — cottage, garden, serene woman thriving alone — and sarton knew it was dishonest because she'd accidentally written it. plant dreaming deep (1968), her memoir of buying a plain house in nelson, new hampshire, after a long partnership ended and her father died, charmed thousands of readers into envy. by her own account, it had made the solitude look too radiant. people wanted to move into a myth. she had left out the weather.
so through 1972–73, in the same house, she kept a deliberately unvarnished journal of one year, and published it as journal of a solitude (1973) — the corrected edition of the solitary life, with everything left in.
the strange word: 'real'
the book opens on her return from weeks of travel, visits, company — and the sentence carries its whole argument in one word: 'alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my \'real\' life again at last.' real. she explains it immediately: friends, even passionate love, were not her real life unless there was time alone in which to explore and discover what had actually happened. notice the inversion. for most of us, company is the real life and the alone hours are the gap between installments. sarton runs it the other way: the alone hours are where the life gets metabolized — where you find out what you think. her stated reason for writing anything at all: 'to find out what i think, to know where i stand.' without the alone time, she's saying, the experiences happen but never become yours.
the weather, kept in
what makes the journal trustworthy is that the verdict survives its own evidence. she records the depressions as they come: 'i was attacked by a storm of tears' — tears she traces not to sadness but to frustration and buried anger never resolved. she is sixty, alone by choice, furious at intervals, flattened at intervals — and she stays, because leaving the house meant losing access to herself. this is the island's most useful realism: choosing your solitude does not mean liking it every day. the rages don't disprove the choice. they're part of the record of a choice that still holds — and a record that hides them, she's saying, lies.
the alone hours aren't the gap between installments of your life. they might be the installment — the place the rest of it gets understood.
the price of being seen
sarton knew the other side of the glass too — what visibility costs. in 1965 she published mrs. stevens hears the mermaids singing, among the first american novels to give a lesbian protagonist a full, undegraded inner life. it was her coming-out as a writer, and the bill arrived at once; her own account, decades on: 'it took courage. i lost two jobs immediately.' she kept writing, and later said she wanted to be read as a universal writer of love even as she became a pioneer for being exactly who she was — both true, both stated here. and when solitude finally turned involuntary — a 1986 stroke that took the poetry for a time — she kept the same daily practice, dictating a journal through recovery and nearly to her death in 1995. the tool that made chosen solitude rich turned out to work on the unchosen kind too. honest notes: her interior weather is her own account, kept as such; and the poverty-of-self line about loneliness everyone attributes to her is pinned to no page anywhere this site could find, so it is described, not printed.
for the glass wall: what if the empty stretch of your week were reclassified — not the failure part, but the digestion part? maybe give one alone hour a job this week: find out what you actually think.