bookreviews_05_26

BOOK REVEIWS

Author’s memoir is both poignant and funny

It’s a curious irony that in the preface to her memoir, Seraphic Singles: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Life, author Dorothy Cummings essentially says, “Hey! I got married! Er . . . sorry?” The book, you see, is about the author coming to terms with being a Catholic single woman as she approaches 40.

Seraphic Singles, which gleans material from her blog of the same name, was a project Cummings undertook while studying in Boston. She characterizes her decision to start the blog (and ultimately publish the book) thusly: “I had recently had a revelation. I wanted to share it with other Catholic women . . . it was okay to be a single woman.” Cummings notes that this might be a somewhat hackneyed realization to the secular world. However, the decision for a devout Catholic to lead a single life is very different from the glamorous and thrilling single world portrayed amongst the pages of glossy magazines and on HBO. We Catholic girls don’t sow our wild oats. We live in solemn contemplation. The question Cummings asks is, what if we have to do that for the rest of our lives? Is that OK? Will we be OK? Her answer is “yes.”

Cummings deftly marries theology, feminism and personal experience into a narrative that is both poignant and funny, sometimes at the same time. The book is episodic, no doubt due to the fact that it was originally a series of blog posts written over the course of a few years. The result of that is less disjointed than one might think, although there are occasionally massive holes in the narrative’s chronology. One is left to assume those weren’t very interesting months for Cummings, but the reader would really like to know for sure.

The book’s episodic nature lends an interesting tenor to the memoir. It was not conceived as a whole, but was created in parts. As a result, the reader can see transformations in the author as she remembers past experiences in light of new developments, learns from failed relationships, and experiences by proxy the Catholic girl’s all-too-common but nevertheless crushing disappointment upon realizing the object of her affection is an atheist. Cummings navigates the tricky world of dating, ponders gender constructs, rails against the feminist pseudo-acceptance of pornography and learns classical Latin against the frigid backdrop of Boston in winter — it always does seem to be winter in that book. One might not agree with all of her conclusions, but she consistently owns them as her own opinion, rather than attempting to state them as fact.

Particularly intriguing is the paradigm shift Cummings undergoes throughout the book. At the beginning of the memoir, one gets the impression she’s determined to convince Catholic women it’s OK to be single despite the fact that it’s awful. It feels as if at the beginning of this project, Cummings wasn’t really convinced herself that it was all right to be single. By book’s end, battered by the dating world and consistently renewed in her faith, she doesn’t need convincing anymore. She knows it’s fine to be a single Catholic woman, and there’s nothing awful about it.

And then she up and got married. Cow. We single Catholic girls will forgive her, though. As she herself proves so deftly, not only is it OK to be single, it’s actually quite nice.

Ward is a freelance writer and aspiring documentary filmmaker based in Saskatoon.