The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  Although that’s not really how I would characterize what happened.

  Alcohol was definitely imbibed in a public place, but it’s not like we intentionally went out and got drunk. He came over to my place to fix my TiVo, and I offered him a beer while he was doing it because that seemed like the hospitable thing to do, and at some point we decided to go out and get some dinner at this place on La Brea, and then we got to talking—and drinking—and maybe I was a little drunk because just a few sips of any sort of pastel-colored fourteen-dollar drink and I’m pretty much a goner. But nothing happened.

  I mean nothing untoward happened.

  We just hung out and talked.

  Like Fanny and Jeremiah Crutchley at Mrs. Thrale’s summer house.

  Like Fanny and George Owen Cambridge at the house on St. Martin’s Street.

  Like Fanny and Colonel Digby while the King was going mad.

  That’s all we did, just talked. And then he walked me to my car—which I was too cheap to valet park—and then I drove him to his car—which he was also too cheap to valet park—and then we said good night in the front seat of my Volkswagen Beetle convertible, and that was it.

  Fade out.

  Opportunity for romance over.

  Obviously, this modern-day spinster story would have a much more stirring conclusion if we had gone back to my place and had sex, but being one of the Wishy-Washy, Dave didn’t make any kind of pass at me, and what was I going to do? Make a pass at him? I mean, how would that even work exactly? How would a thirty-eight-year-old spinster seduce some other girl’s boyfriend in the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle convertible? The whole scenario sounds like ten tons of work to me—and also, you know, just not very nice.

  After all, I’m sure Dave’s girlfriend—if I ever actually met her—would probably end up being quite a bit like me. Definitely thinner and better-looking than I am, but she’s basically my age, right? That fact has already been established, and based on Dave’s reaction to the shoe contest, I think it’s safe to say she doesn’t own $40,000 worth of designer shoes.

  Also, we’ve already established that she knows some of the same alternative-press-type people I know from back when I lived in Brooklyn, and nearly all the people I knew back then were quite a bit like me, and all the people they knew were a lot like them and so on and so forth—only none of us realized this at the time because it was the nineties and we were all super busy being alternative. Plus, I’m guessing she probably reads a lot of books written before 1900 because Dave reads a lot of books that were written before 1900, and while many people would find that annoying and affected, I can’t exactly judge him for this behavior because I used to do the exact same thing back when I was a struggling twentysomething assistant. In fact, that’s pretty much all I did back then: I read books written before 1900 and plotted out creative ways to give people my spec scripts without annoying them too much. That’s why I couldn’t really be too bummed when Dave gave me his, could I? Giving people your spec scripts is something you have to do if you’re trying to get ahead in the entertainment industry. It’s never pleasant. It’s never fun. But—oh shit. I just realized something.

  That’s exactly what happens in the third act of Hannah and Her Sisters.

  I never really thought about it this way before, but a spec script is actually what brings the lovers together at the end. A spec script and the dumb luck of running into each other at the Tower Records near Lincoln Center, which doesn’t exist anymore.

  But then again, neither do records.

  It’s crazy really, if you think about it, how much time has passed since they made Hannah and Her Sisters. When you watch it now, it seems like a period movie. You know, like some sort of bizarre, old-fashioned costume drama from a time before people had cell phones. I was still in high school when it came out, still living in the Rust Belt, and back then we didn’t have Woody Allen movies in my town.

  Or even in my state.

  No, back then you had to drive all the way to Chicago if you wanted to see anything fancy or intellectual like that.

  Oh, shoot. You know what just occurred to me? Maybe I should stop Journaling for Anxiety™ and answer that email Dave sent me. Nothing he said really seemed to require a response, so probably I shouldn’t, right? Let’s face it, if I write back to him now, at this ridiculously late hour, it’s going to look like I’m thinking about him in the middle of the night right before I’m about to have brain surgery.

  Which I guess I am, when you get right down to it.

  Jill thinks that means I’m actually in love with Dave. She slipped up and used that word the other day. She said it was because I talk about him all the time. But I talk about Fanny all the time, and I’m not in love with her.

  I just like to think about her.

  About her career struggles.

  Her financial woes.

  Her romantic difficulties.

  About all the mistakes she made, the many things she got wrong over the course of her eighty-seven anxiety-ridden years on the planet—and about how everything still turned out okay for her in the end. The rudest, bitchiest, most judgmental of Fanny’s biographers would say this was all luck. That’s how she tells the story. She says that in January 1793, Fanny was aging and bitter and borderline neurotic and then—boom—she got really lucky and stumbled upon some love.

  But we create our own luck, don’t we?

  I think I heard that once on Oprah. And Oprah wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. At the very least we have to be prepared for luck to find us. We have to lay the groundwork. To use an example from Hannah and Her Sisters, you can’t just run into your older sister’s ex-husband at Tower Records and ask him to read your spec script if you haven’t actually written the spec script. That’s why I, personally, think Fanny must have done something to deserve the happiness that came to her in the spring of 1793.

  Of course, I still don’t have any idea what it was.

  If I figure it out, I’m definitely going to write that self-help book.

  Arnie Greenblatt will be totally stoked if I do that, since self-help books about falling in love tend to sell really well. They basically just fly off the shelves.

  Even the ones that are not mentioned on Oprah.

  My best guess is that it must have something to do with hope. If you look closely, it’s always lurking there in Fanny’s diary, especially in the parts where the King is going mad. Like on Sunday, November 23, 1788, she describes Digby as being “of the despairing side” and reports that her own hopes “never wholly fail.”

  Or in January 1789, she writes to her bubbly, much-hotter little sister Charlotte…

  We are all creatures of comparison and habit; every comparison here sinks me and my distress into nothing; and the force of habit is such that I now pass whole weeks in this gloom better than, ere thus initiated, I could have passed a single day.

  Even on December 22, 1788, when Digby took leave of her for a week to spend Christmas with his kids, and Fanny got stuck back at the palace playing piquet with the horrible Mrs. Schwellenberg—well, even then she still had her birds, which makes her sound like she’s Cinderella or Saint Francis or something, but I guess she used to leave food out for them, presumably on her windowsill. So these little birds would come, no matter how harsh the weather, to visit her in troops. Hope is often portrayed that way, right? As a thing with feathers? Well, back then, Fanny had hope. She had it to spare and to share with others, and I think that’s what she did to deserve her happy ending.

  And her very own six-part miniseries.

  She hoped.

  She persevered.

  And no matter how bleak things got, she just kept writing.

  Her third chick-lit novel, Camilla, came out in 1796, and since she very smartly sold the copyright and published it by subscription, it earned Fanny more money than she had ever earned before. She and her husband decided to spend it in a way that everyone here in contemporary, twenty-first-century LA would totall
y respect and appreciate: they built a house. A cottage, technically. With two stories, four bedrooms, and a skylight in the roof. So in the end, the young Miss Frances Burney, spinster, of the parish of St. Martin in the Fields, did wind up getting the real-estate-based happily-ever-after. But she got it in a distinctly twenty-first-century way: she earned it herself.

  By her pen.

  Which is also how I happen to own a first edition of that very same book. It’s in five volumes, and at the front it has a list of more than a thousand people who agreed to pay a guinea for it, sight unseen, including a bunch of dukes and duchesses and one Miss J. Austen of Steventon. It also has fs where the letter s should be, so it’s kind of difficult to read, and it cost—well, let me put it this way:

  It cost two pairs of designer shoes.

  But I feel like it was money well spent.

  You know, to own a little piece of Fanny’s life, a little piece of her happiness.

  In March 1794, she wrote to her father describing her married life with M. D’Arblay as “tranquil, undisturbed and undisturbing.”

  Can life, he often says, be more innocent than ours, or happiness more inoffensive? He works in his garden, or studies English and mathematics, while I write. When I work at my needle, he reads to me; and we enjoy the beautiful country around us in long and romantic strolls, during which he carries under his arm a portable garden-chair, lent us by Mrs. Lock, that I may rest as I proceed.

  That sounds kind of hokey, I know. “Long and romantic strolls”? So cliché, right? So exactly the kind of thing that tends to happen at the end of traditional, by-the-numbers Hollywood romantic comedies. I guess even if you try your hardest to tell an unconventional love story—one that breaks all the rules because the hero and heroine don’t even meet until they’re middle-aged and expired, and plus, hello, the female protagonist doesn’t really give a shit about shoes—well, even then you just wind up fading out on something totally hokey like a long, romantic stroll. The detail about the garden-chair is kind of funny, but Fanny was never one of those super outdoorsy types, like Elizabeth Bennet who would walk for miles across muddy fields. Fanny was more of a city girl. And, of course, it’s entirely possible that she was pregnant when she wrote that. On December 18, 1794, when she was forty-two years old, Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction, gave birth to a son named Alexandre, after his father. She outlived him too, of course. But I don’t have the heart to get into all that right now. I’ve got to go and have brain surgery, and for some reason this seems like a good place to stop…with two people in love and about to have a baby.

  Dawn is breaking, and it follows all the rules.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Colleen Dunn Bates, Dorie Bailey, Caitlin Ek, Julianne Johnson, Katelyn Keating, and everyone at Prospect Park Books for taking a chance on The Spinster Diaries—but first and foremost to the intern who read it and loved it. Zoe LaDu, you’re the best!

  I was just about ready to put this book in a drawer and give up entirely when I found my literary agent, Gregory Messina. A huge thank you to him for believing in the book—and to Ben Hayes and Stephanie Barczewski for their part in helping me find Greg. Thanks also to my TV agents, Ari Greenburg and Zachary Druker at WME, for helping me stay gainfully employed while I was writing the book, to Amy Tierney for a great author photo, and to Laura Birek for website design.

  I’m deeply grateful to have known the late George Hodgman. His thoughts on the book were astute and invaluable, and his generosity and sweetness inspired me to keep going. Thank you as well to my fellow students in George’s 2016 Aspen Summer Words novel-editing workshop—Melissa Chadburn, Leah Worthy, Lynda Montgomery, Vinod Busjeet, and Eleanor Shelton—and to all the other passionate, dedicated, and talented writers I met at Aspen Summer Words and also at the Sirenland Writers Conference.

  While The Spinster Diaries is technically a novel, Professor Catherine Parisian fact-checked the manuscript for me at an early stage. Thanks to her for lending me her Burney expertise.

  Dana Greenblatt read this book more times than I can remember and never stopped asking me about it. Never. Ever. Even when I wanted her to. Same with Kimberly Dukes, who has been (foolishly) believing in me with all her heart and soul since I brought her that subway token in the fall of 1986. Adam Langer gave me early encouragement that I will be forever grateful for. Thanks to him and to everyone else who read the book along the way.

  Gayle Abrams, Workplace Best Friend, vaulted into a whole new category when she invited me to go walking with her at Fryman circa 2000…and we have never stopped walking (at least metaphorically). And talking. And trying to find our voices as writers. Thank you, R.

  Like Frances Burney, I owe a huge debt to my father, who passed away in 2010. What little money he made filling prescriptions and playing drugstore, he squandered on my fancy Ivy League education. I would not be where I am without him. Same is true of my mom and my siblings. A spinster novelist needs amazing nieces and nephews to fulfill the stereotype. Thanks to my brother and sisters, I have seven.

  One final category: thanks for everything. To Danny Reichert, who is now REQUIRED to sit here with me. And to Anita Harrison, who never stopped listening.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GINA FATTORE is a moderately successful television writer whose credits include Dare Me, Better Things, Masters of Sex, Parenthood, Californication, Gilmore Girls, and Dawson’s Creek. Before moving to Los Angeles to become a TV writer, she was an assistant editor at the Chicago Reader. Her essays and reviews have appeared there and also in The Millions, Salon, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In 2015 she delivered a TEDx talk about spinsterhood called “Become What You Believe.”