The Irresistible Appeal Of An Unmarried Woman

and other good decisions I made this month

If you read this newsletter, or either of my books, or follow my instagram you know I have a longstanding devotion to Paul Mazursky’s 1978 film An Unmarried Woman starring Jill Clayburgh.

The view from the balcony at Metrograph. I joked to my friends that I could probably describe the floor plan of each of these buildings.

The film is about a woman who has to rebuild her life after her husband leaves her for a younger man. But of course, it’s so much more. One of the reasons I keep returning to it, is that it’s one of the rare films, or television series, that allows a woman a happy ending that doesn’t involve marriage or a child. Another is that it’s a near perfect film. Jill Clayburgh’s performance is one of the best.

I take any opportunity to slide it into my writing. One of the lines from the film, ““Balls,” said the Queen. “If I had them, I’d be king.”” is a chapter title in No One Tells You This. During Covid I tracked down a print of the Paul Jenkins painting that features so heavily in the final scene (Jenkins did all Saul’s the paintings ). I also found one of the original theatre cards featuring Clayburgh dancing around her apartment in her underwear on eBay, and it now sits over my record player in a thick gilded frame (with a postcard of L'Origine du monde slid into the side, for good measure.) I write about some of this in Enjoy.

But the truth is, before last week, I hadn’t actually seen it in years. After Mazursky died in 2014 it was briefly added to Netflix, where I watched it on repeat. But since then, it’s disappeared. Which is another way of saying, you can’t stream it anywhere. Not for rent, not for purchase. (Personally, I take this as an early indication of where things were heading.) To watch it, you have to buy the dvd, and presumably a dvd player since computers no longer come equipped. Or you have to cross your fingers that someone who shares your obsession organizes a film festival and includes it.

Which! Is exactly what happened. To celebrate the release of her new memoir No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek put together a divorce series at Metrograph on the Lower East Side (The Age of Innocence was also part of this). As soon as I saw tickets, I corralled a number of friends and we all went to see last Sunday night.

It was unexpectedly fascinating to watch it with 2025 eyes. And I don’t just mean, 2025 in the sense of the catastrophe we are currently living through. But also, my own eyes specifically. I was just turning 40 the last time I engaged with this film, and as I write in No One Tells You This, was very much reckoning with what my life might look like in the years ahead. This conversation is far more common now than it was a decade (!!) ago. But at the time it felt like there was little for me to reference, and this film was both a salve and a promise that things could be great.

This time around I found it surprisingly delightful, and funny, and also shockingly progressive. Not just for 1978, but for 2025. So often you return to old movies you love and cringe at what you once considered normal behaviour. In this case, I found myself horrified to realize so much of this would not be allowed on screen. At one point, Clayburgh’s character Erica has a casual conversation over breakfast with her teenage daughter, who tells her how she and her friends collectively paid for a friend’s abortion because the boy wouldn’t. There’s the way Erica dismisses men. Ejecting them from cabs, from bars. Her grief and rage palpable but never framed as hysteria. The way in which she asks for the sex she wants, and then refuses the companionship the men call for because she is not ready, or simply not interested. The continual demand for self. It felt downright radical at times, even dangerous.

I loved, too, Erica’s conversations with her therapist (played by real life therapist Dr. Penelope Russianoff…what a name! AND filmed in her apartment). I loved the conversation about Erica getting her period for the first time. So much of the movie focuses on small moments; a friend remarked Mazursky must have been consulting women to have come up with some of the dialogue (he dedicated it to his wife Betsy). In that sense, it reminded me of the appeal of Deborah Levy or Annie Ernaux. (Though everyone laughed when Erica bemoaned that she hadn’t had sex in, wait for it….seven weeks. Ha.) The scene of Erica dancing in her underwear to Swan Lake feels somehow miraculous to me. Such a small, but truthful glimpse into a woman enjoying herself, by herself. (I’d love to know whether that brief moment Clayburgh breaks the fourth wall was planned or impromptu.)

You can see Sex and the City all through the film. The conversations Erica has with her friends over dinners (one is sleeping with a nineteen-year-old, “do you want to screw him or adopt him,” someone says.) The painter Saul (played by a very appealing Alan Bates) who Erica falls in love with, but won’t run away with, is a fairly clear prototype for Aleksandr Petrovsky. I don’t know how I know this, but I’m fairly certain An Unmarried Woman is one of SJP’s favorite films. You can’t help but wonder how much better the ending of SATC would have been if they’d hadn’t capitulated to the fans, and instead of reintroducing Big had let Carrie march into the future solo instead.

Off she goes, like Odysseus, navigating the uncertain waters of NYC with her painting as sail.

But the thing that struck me the most was the role New York City real estate plays. No doubt, this contributed to my initial love of the film, but I’d somehow forgotten. And seeing on the big screen gave it extra umph. The opening shot, for instance, takes us along the 59th St. Bridge and up the East River skyline. It’s reminiscent of that great quote from Gatsby that always comes to mind when I come across the bridge: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” (This view was also listed by Nora Ephron as one of the things she would miss). The skyline is not so much a backdrop to Erica’s life, as her life partner. She dances against it, loves against it, grieves against it, and loses herself in it. In the end she chooses a new apartment (in cheaper Brooklyn….lol) over the man. For any lover of New York, the film captures the city in this extraordinary moment at the tail end of the Seventies fiscal crisis, before the crack and AIDS epidemics of the Eighties. The Soho lofts! The parties. The Halston. Marry me, New York.

“Tell me about a complicated (wo)man. Muse, tell me how (s)he wandered.”

After the screening, Mlotek brought on stage the writer Lynne Tillman to discuss it. Tillman lived in New York at the time, and recalled seeing the film on release. Something she said really stuck with me. She observed that the film was really a romcom, gliding over the extended trauma of divorce. I’m not sure this is a criticism necessarily. Goodness knows romcoms glide over the realities of love. But the more I thought about it, the more I was struck by how the film is really a romance with the city. Which at a certain age, (and as I write somewhere in Enjoy) is the romance so many of us are navigating after a certain age. For better and worse (but also, better).

If you look closely you can spot her at the crosswalk with her painting. Though I love the two women at the forefront. So many wonderful unmarried women!

Other things I did in February:

I attended a packed Community Town Hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Topics discussed included rats (a personal obsession, as you might know); eBikes (also of interest, and probably the most heated topic in the West Side Rag comments section aka the greatest publication in America ); the escalator at Columbus Circle; and what schools are doing to protect the children of asylum speakers. Because this is New York, Wynton Marsalis also spoke (though did not play, alas). It was the most heartening two hours I’ve spent since Jan 20. I cannot encourage you enough to go to local community meetings. People are involved and invested and it is a fantastic reminder that democracy (large and small d/D) is not dead. It’s also a terrific antidote to despair.

I spoke to Jenny Mag about the complicated feelings I have around the older women and Hollywood conversation. I was also Philly NPR with Sheri Cole to discuss that NYT Gen X article.

Speaking of fresh eyes, I reread a lot of books. I have a stack of new books I would like to read but my brain was not up for new information this month. Instead I returned and found new things in old standbys that stood out to me:

Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laugher and Forgetting. I first read this in 1998 after plucking it from the bookshelf of my first NYC roommate. She was Swiss, and a dancer, and very chic. I was none of these things, to put it mildly. The line that lodged itself in my brain was this: “Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.” Which may be the best description/prediction of social media I’ve ever come across. On this reading, however, it was Kundera’s descriptions of living under a totalitarian regime that felt terrifying relevant an relatable. “People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”

Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion. Some people had Catcher in the Rye. I had this. My early twenties journals are full of quotes from it. I’ve reread it multiple times, but in this case the parts about Napoleon and war and violence really drove deep.

Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. When I was eleven I decided I wanted to read “important books.” During this time, I was home sick for a few days and my mother asked me if I wanted a book from the store. I confused War and Peace with War and Remembrance (probably because the latter was a huge miniseries on television at the time) and she brought me this, the first of Wouk’s two-part WWII opus. I love this book. It’s not literature. But it’s great historical fiction, even though the female leads are rather thin to my now grown eyes (also it’s apparently a favorite of Henry Kissinger’s, so caveat emptor). Suffice to say, once I finished it, I was an eleven-year-old with a strangely indepth knowledge of, among other things, the Battle of Midway, and the Holocaust (I’ve never forgotten one of the warehouses in Auschwitz was called Kanada, because it housed stolen, confiscated valuables and Canada was a country associated with wealth and prosperity). I’ve read this book multiple times. It’s great for long plane rides or the like, but this reread was the first time the descriptions of Hitler’s rise to power, and the degree he was initially taken as an unserious buffoon, hit with new understanding.

Mildred D Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. At the Red Clay performance (see below) one of the writers highlighted was Gloria Naylor. I didn’t read Naylor growing up, but the way she was talked about brought to mind this book, which had an enormous impact on me when I read it in 7th grade. I always think it should be taught in conjunction with To Kill a Mockingbird. The poem from which the title takes its name, and which is included in the book, emblazoned itself on my brain to a degree that after not coming in contact with the book for fifteen years, when I finally got another copy I still had it memorized word for word. Needless to say, it also feels horrifyingly relevant. What we understand has history, in so many cases, is basically things that happened last week.

I did not buy this scarf, though if someone else does I will probably be sad about it (but not sad enough to buy it before I tell you this).

I attended an incredible and moving performance of Rebecca Carroll’s I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like (a book I was honored to blurb) at the Lincoln Center.

I had a conversation with my friend Miriam about the protest actions we’re taking right now or thinking about taking. I don’t want to operate from a place of shock are alarm any more. I’d love to know what you’re all doing? You can respond to this email, if you like, and I'll collect them for a future edition.