The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  Not great, right? But in the summer of 1781, things are still going pretty well for Fanny. She’s in the midst of trying to write her second chick-lit novel, Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress. The goddamn thing is like a thousand pages long, so Fanny will still be trying to write it in the fall of 1781, the winter of 1781, that next spring, etc., etc., &c. Basically, Fanny will be writing Cecilia right up until the very moment it goes to press in June 1782, and it ends up being a ridiculously huge success. Princesses will read it. Dowager duchesses. Milliners. Bishops. Members of Parliaments. It won’t make her tons of money or dramatically improve her love life, but at least it will be done. Finished. Over. At which point, things will begin to go drastically downhill for Fanny. Parts Three, Four, and Five of my miniseries? I don’t want to give too much away, but those next ten years are going to be kind of tough for my heroine—kind of sucky. That whole mishegoss with George Owen Cambridge is really going to take it out of her, and that job she gets working for the Queen? Ugh. Double ugh.

  That job.

  No way would I ever wish that job on my worst enemy, so before things start to suck so completely for Fanny, I think it might be nice—both for her and for the overall dramaturgical flow of the ill-fated, six-part miniseries—to pause for just a brief moment and let this one tiny little thing go her way. Lord knows you can’t have the real-estate-based happily-ever-after at the end of Part Two of your ill-fated, six-part miniseries (even I’m not that crazy), but there’s no reason you can’t have a little summer romance. Nonsence! Teizing! Even a few moonlit walks. Something lighthearted, carefree, breezy, optimistic—something filled with hope. That's where the hope goes, right? In Part Two, when you’re twenty-nine. Twenty-nine is the age of hope, the last moment where everything seems possible. That’s the way I’m writing Part Two of my ill-fated, six-part miniseries. Also, it would annoy me too goddamn much to write the version where what was really going on that summer was that Jeremiah Crutchley was actually in love with Mrs. Thrale.

  Or with Mrs. Thrale’s seventeen-year-old daughter.

  Those are the other two, very real historical possibilities that totally explain what the fuck Jeremiah Crutchley was doing hanging out all the damn time at Mrs. Thrale’s country house, and if you think about things calmly and logically, they do make tons of sense.

  Mrs. Thrale was famously beautiful, totally not shy, and had loads of money.

  Plus, she was only four years older than Crutchley, which isn’t many if you think about it. Her daughter was—well, her daughter was seventeen. And that’s another way in which the world hasn’t changed much since the late eighteenth century. Seems to me if you take a wealthy thirty-six-year-old guy of any century and give him a choice between a timid, twenty-nine-year-old novelist, a sexy-dangerous widow of forty, and the widow’s seventeen-year-old daughter—more often than not, no matter what century he’s from, he’s gonna choose the seventeen-year-old girl.

  But, frankly, I don’t really see the fun in telling that story. Agents love to sell it. Cable networks love to buy it. But don’t most of us know it already? Also, the story about the “empowered,” sexy, older woman, the rich widow who’s been doing Pilates and looks great and therefore has her pick of suitors—that one sounds kind of familiar too, right? That one’s not unprecedented. But the story about the thirty-six-year-old guy who falls in love with the widow’s timid, impoverished best friend? That’s the one we haven’t heard before, right? Rarely in contemporary, twenty-first-century LA do a bunch of entertainment professionals get together and decide to tell a story about anything happening to anyone’s best friend. We have laws against that here. And we certainly don’t ever get together and tell a love story about the Best Friend. No, mostly we just keep the Best Friend around so that the Main Character has someone to talk to about her love-related difficulties. Maybe we cast an acerbic chubby girl with glasses. Or a gay guy unafraid to walk around in culottes. Either way, the Best Friend basically doesn’t have to do anything except listen to all the Main Character’s bullshit and act all sympathetic about it, which is exactly what Fanny ultimately ended up doing for Mrs. Thrale in real life.

  Yes, it’s true.

  Three summers later, Mrs. Thrale actually ran off to Italy and married her daughter’s music teacher. This caused a scandal so big that Dr. Johnson had a stroke, lost the power of speech, and died over it, only I don’t have time to get into that right now because of my new plan to submit Part One of my ill-fated miniseries to the BBC—write up a proposal, do a synopsis of all the episodes, etc., etc., &c. Also, any second now, the people who hired me to work on this television show are going to figure to out that they’re paying me huge sums of money to sit in my office all day Journaling for Anxiety™ and sorting out eighteenth-century love quadrangles, and then they’re going to give me another writing assignment.

  Or make me go back in the story room.

  I can just feel it. I’ve been in the network-TV writing game long enough to have a sixth sense about when some giant shitstorm of revisions is about to hit. Somewhere behind closed doors, at least one episode must be going down. Maybe two? Seriously. It’s far too quiet around here. This doesn’t bode well for the rest of the year.

  Or the rest of the week.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2006

  WELL, I’VE DONE IT.

  I’ve made it all the way to Thanksgiving.

  Which is both the beginning and the end of Hannah and Her Sisters. Only this Thanksgiving hasn’t wound up being at all like either of those two, where Carrie Fisher cracks wise and old people sing songs around a piano.

  No, this Thanksgiving (like all my Thanksgivings) wound up being a lot more like that part in Annie Hall where the screen splits and we see everyone in Alvie’s family shoving food into their mouths and shouting at each other about which family members have various ailments: diabetes, a coronary. I honestly don’t know why I keep making these weird little holiday jaunts back to the Rust Belt. They never seem to go too well. I always end up catching some kind of pestilence from my six nieces and nephews or getting food poisoning or a migraine or nearly fainting in the three-hour line to pick up a rental car at O’Hare.

  Thank god for other spinsters traveling alone who will offer to watch your stuff while you go to the vending machine to buy some pretzels.

  No, the sad truth that must be faced here is that I have failed—completely and utterly failed—in my original mission to combine my brain tumor with a stressed-out, overworked TV-writing career and produce a frothy little Hannah and Her Sisters–inspired romantic comedy.

  Witty banter.

  Great clothes.

  Love Interests, both true and faux.

  You’ve simply got to have that stuff in a romantic comedy, and because of my devotion to The Spinster Way, I can’t bring any of that to the table. Jill actually pointed this out the other day. In a nice way, but still she noticed it. She said that back in June when she first met me, she expected me to be like the shoe girls and have some sort of story I desperately needed to tell about my singleness—about why my “relationships” never work out, or about how surprised I am to have ended up here over thirty and, alas, still single. But after about five months of lunches, she said it started to dawn on her that I wasn’t just being shy or holding back all my super boring, sexually explicit stories out of some exaggerated sense of propriety.

  And she’s right.

  I really don’t have any stories like that to tell. Not a one. So instead I seem to be borrowing Fanny’s…

  Thomas Barlow.

  Jeremiah Crutchley.

  George Owen Cambridge.

  Hell, I’ve even left some out just to speed things along. Sir Joshua Reynolds. Heard of him? Super famous portrait painter. Mostly deaf and nearly thirty years older than Fanny. I swear there’s a point in the diaries where he comes up as a possible suitor. A slightly more age-appropriate option was Fanny’s very young, handsome cousin, Edward Francisco Burney, who painted her portrait not
once, but twice.

  But then again, he might have been too young and handsome.

  After all, we tend not to like it so much when a romantic comedy heroine is nearly a decade older than the Love Interest. That never really goes over well at the box office. Still, family legend always had it that Edward had a thing for Fanny, and the main way he seems to have expressed this thing is by refusing to go for long walks and leaning against the chimney doing nothing, which—in my humble opinion—isn’t really all that different from how the young people of today express their love-related inclinations.

  Certainly, if you spend any time during the doldrums of October talking to the twentysomething assistants about their love lives, the concept of immobility always seems to creep into the conversation at some point. Dave, for instance, has tons of stories like this to tell. They never involve leaning against a chimney—there’s usually some modern equivalent, like lying on the couch watching Rocky V—but the effect is basically the same. And he’s not even in his twenties anymore. Nope, he’s definitely made the leap into his early thirties, which I had begun to suspect based on his cultural references; and now it’s been confirmed because we had one of those wretched office birthdays for him, and he owned up to being thirty-two. The other thing that’s been confirmed about Dave—and it pains me to say this, because this is way worse of a crime than being over thirty and still working as a writers’ assistant, or wearing flip-flops every day when it’s November and there’s fake snow all over the lot—well, it turns out that Dave, our very own Dave, is one of the Wishy-Washy.

  You see, he lives with this girlfriend he’s always going on about (the one who knows some of the same people I know), and I suppose it could be really sweet that he’s always going on about her, except that specifically what he’s always going on about is how much he wants to break up with this girl. Only he can’t, because she’s so nice, they’ve been together for years now, how would he ever find another girl who was better than this one, etc., etc., &c.

  Textbook Wishy-Washy, no?

  They’re the scourge of the twenty-first century, the Wishy-Washy, in exactly the same way that Rakes were once the scourge of the eighteenth century, but can I be honest here?

  They’re not a terribly interesting scourge.

  Rakes had style; they had panache. They drove a low-hung curricle. They ran off to Gretna Green with your sister. They did stuff—and they did it in a timely manner. The Wishy-Washy tend to inflict the majority of their damage by not doing things.

  They don’t call.

  They don’t say I love you.

  They don’t propose.

  They do nothing and they say nothing, and in many instances they will actually drag out this doing-and-saying-nothing process for years before they decide to move on and do nothing and say nothing with a different girl. Although maybe I shouldn’t use the word “girl” quite so freely, because Jill—using her amazing, married-lady powers of inquisition—pulled it out of Dave that the girl in question, the one he admits he definitely doesn’t want to settle down and have children with, well, it turns out this girl is almost forty.

  That’s right.

  She’s quite a bit older than Dave is, which instantly shed a whole new light on the Dave situation, because before, I guess we all thought he was wasting the prime childbearing years of a girl in her early thirties, but now we realize he’s doing this to a girl her late thirties, and even though he does seem to be aware that this is a pretty shitty thing to do to someone, still, it bears repeating.

  So Jill repeated it.

  In what I swear was a very nice way.

  And then eventually, we got back to discussing the personal lives of the characters on the show.

  We’ve been doing a lot more of that lately.

  Staying in the room for hours and hours. Working through lunch. Ordering pizza at night. Rebreaking stories that have already been broken and written and prepped and cast, and then at the last second, someone will have a freak-out about one of them, and it will have to be reconfigured in some huge way that makes it seem different to the actors and the network, but still uses all the standing sets in a cost-efficient manner. It’s confusing, I know, but it’s just how things work in TV. Obviously, it’s way more fun to sit around talking about the personal lives of the people in the room. That’s how interesting revelations come to light, like this one about Dave being one of the Wishy-Washy and wasting the prime childbearing years of an unsuspecting female who probably shouldn’t be so unsuspecting, and even though I now have a brand-new writing assignment to obsess over—Jill and I are going to cowrite Episode 16!—and all hell is breaking loose in the story room, I feel I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to point that this is exactly, and I do mean exactly, what happened with Fanny and that evil bastard of a clergyman George Owen Cambridge.

  In her early thirties, the not-so-young Miss Frances Burney made what may have been the biggest mistake of her life. She put all her eggs in a basket marked GEORGE OWEN CAMBRIDGE, and I think we can all guess how that turned out. Sounds familiar, right? Everybody knows that girl. She’s among the legions of females walking around today who spent their prime childbearing years “hanging out” in a wide variety of nonspecific, non-legally-binding ways with some guy who never produced a ring, and now they are all old and expired and, alas, still single.

  Well, back in Fanny’s day, this was not the usual order of business. Nope, back then people knew exactly how dangerous “hanging out” could be. How often it led to heartache, and, more significantly, in a patriarchal society plagued by a lack of effective birth control methods, unwanted pregnancy and the nagging fear that your eldest son wasn’t really your eldest son. So back then, if you were a guy who enjoyed hanging out with a girl—if you found her interesting or sweet or kind or ridiculously beautiful or basically your parents just really enjoyed the fact that she was totally loaded—well, at a certain point you were required to declare your intentions.

  This was not negotiable.

  You had to state, unequivocally, what exactly you were prepared to do about the situation, and while I’m sure that was a major bummer for the guys of the past—you know, having to be all decisive and shit—in exchange for this onerous burden, they got to vote and own property and do tons of stuff adult women of the late eighteenth century couldn’t even begin to think about doing, like wearing pants and leaving the house unchaperoned.

  And this is basically where Fanny got into trouble with George Owen Cambridge.

  They saw each other eight times between December 26, 1782, and January 18, 1783.

  Eight times in four weeks.

  That feels like a lot, no?

  Fanny’s BFF Mrs. Thrale seemed to think so.

  By February 1783, she was teasing Fanny: “Is George Cambridge in love with you, or is he not?” And in April, she writes more definitively: “My dearest Miss Burney has apparently got an Admirer in Mr George Cambridge.” And then she goes on to say, “If they marry, I shall have perhaps more of her Company than now, for her Mother in Law [i.e., her Wicked Stepmother] is a greater Tyrant than any Husband would be, especially a Man whose heart is apparently engaged.”

  The key word here being “apparently.”

  Remember George Owen Cambridge was one of a new breed of men.

  He wasn’t a Rake.

  He wasn’t a Nice Guy.

  He was one of the Wishy-Washy.

  And back in the late eighteenth century, the Wishy-Washy approach to courtship was so novel, so revolutionary, so utterly new, that no one quite knew what to make of it. It flummoxed everyone—old, young, men, women—which, now that I think about it, probably explains why Fanny got such shitty advice about her love life during this time. Her contemporaries just couldn’t parse it. It didn’t compute. Why would a man spend so much time hanging out with a woman he had no intention of marrying?

  It seemed like love, this elaborate game George Owen Cambridge was playing. It seemed like courtship. It certa
inly followed all the rules of courtship, and even some of the Rules for Romantic Comedy.

  He sat next to her at parties.

  He stopped by the house on St. Martin’s Street.

  He shared private jokes with her about Mrs. Vesey’s hearing aid.

  He was incredibly nice to her gay best friend.

  Or, you know, since they didn’t officially have gay people back then, her best Italian-castrato-singer friend.

  Eventually, Fanny’s favorite sister, Susanna (the one who loved to play the piano and spoke French really well), was able to get to the bottom of this perplexing behavior. Of course, by that point, Fanny had lost all her career momentum and her prime childbearing years were disappearing in the rearview mirror—but, hey, we have to cut the favorite sister some slack. Back in 1782, she married an officer in the Royal Marines named Molesworth Phillips, and by 1785 she had two small children and some sort of serious health problem that required her to move to France for a year. Plus, this Molesworth Phillips character turned out to be a gambler and an unfeeling reprobate, which will come up big-time in Part Five of my six-part miniseries, but once again I am getting away from the point, which is that eventually, Fanny’s favorite sister did what no one else walking around Georgian England could do circa 1786.