“If you’d asked me five years ago — let’s say five years and seven weeks — where I saw myself, five years and seven weeks into the future, I would not have mentioned a husband, children, living in six different countries. I was thirty-five and had never had a really serious romance. This mostly didn’t bother me. I liked living alone. I would never have called myself single. The word suggests a certain willingness to flirt in bars or take out advertisements for oneself on the Internet: single people are social in hope that they won’t be single forever. I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was that person.”
–Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, page 21
Apt
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That passage rung true with me, too, when I read it (I was single until my mid-30s). I definitely saw myself as the eternal madcap uncle spoiling his nieces and nephews and living a madcap, almost haphazard life.
Reason number 498,986 why I adore that woman.
I don’t fit into the thirty-five category just yet, but it was scary how much I identified with this passage. I do believe this is going to be the next thing that I read.