We're delighted to present an extract from Maeve In America, the acclaimed new collection of essays from Maeve Higgins, published by New Island.
Fifteen funny and perceptive essays about one woman's messy path to finding her footing in another country, from the acclaimed comedian, author, actor and podcaster...
Are You My Husband
Many women have reservations the size of reservations about their husbands or boyfriends, but they put them aside and hold on tight to their man, as if we are still back in Jane Austen's day. I know some of these women; you will find a list of their names on my website, www.foundmymrcol- lins.co. conflicted. From my high and single horse, I feel that they would be better off alone, I think they should do it themselves. I get it, though; mortgages are expensive, Sundays are long, social pressure is high. And it’s nice to get that life department all cleared up and ready to hibernate in for the winter, even if it is in the basement and there’s no central heating and one time a crow got in and you’re not sure if it ever flew back out again.
Being alone is great for all the small stuff: seeing whatever you want at the movies, eating in that weird way you can only eat by yourself, going on vacation wherever you like. Being alone is ideal for eavesdrop- ping, for really relaxing, and, at times, for forcing me to be sociable. And, in truth, being alone is great for the big stuff too. I have yet to go through an illness or a loss or a nuclear war, knock on wood, without a partner, and perhaps I would change my tune if I had to. Actually, what am I talking about? At the first hint of real trouble I would immediately step up my campaign to meet and marry Michael Fassbender. Be that as it may, I do know that being alone has been good for my version of big stuff: moving countries, being a writer, and hanging huge portraits of Beyoncé and Serena in my living room.
I know that many people dread the prospect of being alone; they fear that the solitude will magnify their flaws and force them to face up to who they really are. But the funny thing I’ve discovered is that being alone can actually be a way of escaping who you are, or who you think you are, a chance to make up new versions, better versions. I’m not talking about the witness protection programme here, rather the gentle way you can surprise yourself, the way that is too easily undone by a companion with a set idea of how you should be. I’ve found that being alone allows me to become part of a place, to somehow melt into the fabric of it, however foreign I may be to that place. When I am alone, nobody will say, however fondly, It’s so like you to say that, Maeve. Or, Hmm, I didn’t think you’d like Turkish coffee. I’ve been to all sorts of places – a dumpling house in Melbourne, a wedding in Brooklyn, a public park in Shiraz – and I have really been there, really experienced them. Those places have absorbed me without question, because I was able to disperse myself among them. I was not this whole formed thing, this solid block, I was just floating particles that formed and reformed as they wished or needed to, with no clear set of rules, nobody else’s expectations to act into.
I’ve always been this way, wincing when a barista recognises me and shouts my order down the line. My nightmare gift is a box of tiny thoughtful gifts collected by an earnest boyfriend. You know, a book I read and loved at fourteen, a handful of all-yellow Jelly Babies, a framed photo of my nieces, and, God forbid, some kind of mixtape! I would say thank you, politely, eyes shining with fear that he would mistake for gratitude, then I’d excuse myself and jump right out of the closest window. I don’t want to be scrutinised like a set of blueprints, I want to be off by myself, alone in my thoughts, able to vanish whenever I need to.
I grew up sharing a room with three of my sisters, in a house on a small island where both of my parents’ families lived too, all of us just off another small island, Ireland. With aunts and uncles, cousins and family friends, I had a typically idyllic Irish childhood and I was never alone. I still wonder at the relief I feel when I am alone, because I didn’t hate that life at all. Today, it’s a pure pleasure to visit Cobh and have old ladies stop me outside the shop we used to get ice-cream cones from as children, and tell me I look like my grandmother, and ask which one of the Higgins girls I am. It’s incredibly comforting to have a doctor who vaccinated me as a baby, who knows my entire extended family’s medical history, who prescribed me birth control as a teenager (for acne, naturally), ask me how I’m doing, how I’m really doing. So why, then, do I crave a silent apartment, a train crowded with strangers, a forty-block walk where hundreds of people will see me but nobody will really look? I’m not sure what it is I need this anonymity for; it’s not as if I got to New York and felt, Aha, now I’m finally free to kill! But living in this city, so far from where I was born, feels like a rare and precious freedom, one I sense is not afforded to many women in the world. But freedom from what? I can’t seem to say, it’s just that my personality’s instant response to anything and everything is a little-red-hen- style shimmy and a quick, I’ll do it myself.
Maeve In America by Maeve Higgins (published by New Island) is out now - find out more here.
