Once, it happened across opposing escalators. My gaze intersected with a man’s on the ascendant stairway. He rode to the top then followed me back down into the metro station, which was also a Carrefour where I was buying yogurt. When he asked for my phone number, I was so startled I told him I didn’t have a French number yet, which was true. I showed him the “no signal” icon as proof. When he asked for my email address, I told him I had a boyfriend, which was untrue. He gave me his email in case it didn’t work out.
A variation of this event happened six or seven times my first week in Toulouse—in waiting at crosswalks, but also mid-stride down the pavement. Our eyes would lock inadvertently, and the man would ask for my phone number. I would point to the no-signal sign because I didn’t possess the assertiveness to be more accurate with my refusals. The man never seemed crestfallen. His eyes skipped on as if he’d approached several women that day and would continue, in his travels, to approach several more. There might have been a code of eye contact I was missing, or I reeked of availability and newness. That first week, I explored the city with a tourist’s attention to street signs and I roamed everywhere alone. By week two, I walked with my eyes down.
As an introvert in my twenties, I learned to internalize the mechanics of invisibility. “How can I be less visible here?” Or, to rephrase: “How can I be less invitingly alone?” Certainly there are more empowering ways to steer through public spaces, but this technique of self-effacement is one I have turned to in moments of retreat. Retreat in both senses of the word: withdrawal, but also a quiet, secluded place where I can slip inward. More often than not, my site of retreat—my tacit Do-Not-Disturb sign—is a book.
Though I was “visible” in Toulouse, no one perceived me as a danger or as a threat to their worldview. One’s visibility or invisibility in public spaces depends on their race, as well as their gender presentation, class (how clothes indicate economic status, for instance), able-ness, and age. In other words, I was safe, a privilege of my whiteness. But this isn’t an essay about safeness, which—as a white-bodied cis person—I feel less and less qualified to discuss. Rather, I want to explore in/visibility as it pertains to feminine aloneness, and how reading might collude with both—as a site of retreat, but also the opposite, when women (or anyone not male-identified) do their reading and thinking in public.
In her essay on “Lastingness,” which is really an essay on reading, from her collection Nilling, Lisa Robertson says that “reading’s topos, its place of agency, is invisible, and necessarily so. Reading resists being seen.” Reading does change the world, Robertson maintains, but not visibly: “its acts are clandestine.” I like this word “clandestine,” because the inconspicuousness I seek when I read in public is not meek or reticent, but covert. The thrill of seeing while remaining unseen. Before I became a writer, I wanted to be a spy. I played a game where I selected a person at random and followed them down the street. I trailed by ten or twenty paces, letting myself blur into the crush of other bodies while I pegged my eyes on the subject’s hat or orange Sainsbury’s bag. Once, I followed a man into his optometrist’s office. We sat opposite each other in the waiting room, where I thumbed an issue of House & Home. If that makes me sound like a creep, I have no defense really, except I only played this game once or twice. I suppose I wanted to test my own conspicuousness and whether I could, if pressed, disappear. Again, this choice to disappear—for “disappearance” to be optional or even possible—reflects my privileges as an able-bodied, cisgendered white person in environments where able-bodied, cisgendered white people form the dominant majority. With that point restated, invisibility has been a condition, now and then, that I have sought.
Though a book is not truly an invisibility cloth and a reader may be seen, what they are reading remains hidden to those around them. What I see, when I read, feels like another person. In her acceptance speech for the Sonning Prize in 1975, Hannah Arendt described thinking as a “soundless dialogue between me and myself; it is the only way in which I can keep myself company and be content with it.” Reading is similar. In times of solitude, chosen or otherwise, a book opens a gateway to another person’s mind. As Lisa Robertson articulates, “as I read, my self-consciousness is not only suspended, but temporarily abolished by the vertigo of another’s language.” To me, that’s how relationship feels: self-consciousness abolished by another person’s vertigo. After you pass that phase of infatuation where you project ideals onto your mate, you are swept into the centrifugal mess of their otherness. You make adjustments. Lisa Robertson says of reading, “it’s up me to receive, to be inhabited by this alterity.” That is, to be inhabited by otherness, for that otherness to take root. Relationships and reading both, in their ways, supple our minds and anoint our reception to others. In relationship, two people face each other, and between themselves, they project a world, as Lisa Robertson describes it. “This space between two,” Robertson writes, “is an immodest one—it remains mostly unavailable to a community.”
Two friends gesticulating down the sidewalk. Two heads hooked over glasses of Malbec. Two lovers hissing grievances in the frozen food aisle. Two yoked in enraged silence on the metro. They’re unavailable to the rest of us. We might eavesdrop, but we rarely approach them. Had I been a two in Toulouse—a romantic or platonic two—the man would not have followed me down the escalator. And when I read on the metro, or in a park, I mimic twoness. I always feel, at first, ruffled when someone disrupts my reading. That same ruffling occurs when a stranger interrupts two friends in conversation. It happens, of course: a pleasant enough exchange followed by an embarrassed apology before everyone returns to their vertigoes. We use the verb “absorb” in either context: “I was absorbed in conversation;” “sorry, I was absorbed in my book.” In both cases, the submersion into another mind’s dizziness pitches an implicit screen that keeps the person(s) inside relatively off-limits.
It first occurred to me I had replaced relationships with reading when a visit from an ex-boyfriend necessitated the singular labor of plucking each book off my bed so he would have room to sit. When you share a bed with someone, they are the last person you see at night and the first person you see in the morning. In my case, this intimate—forgive me—bookend between waking and dreaming is literally a book. As I read six or seven books at a time, generally from bed, which I occupy generally on my own, they’ve begun to accumulate on the other side of my mattress the approximate width, if not length, of a body.
Lisa Robertson writes that in reading, she “undoes” a text. There’s something erotic about the verb “undo”—how we undo a button or the buckle of a belt. How a person can leave us feeling “undone.” The act of reading, of running our eyes from one side of the page to the other, becomes an act of disrobing. Indeed, we speak of the body of an essay, a body of work. Live speech, by contrast, is evanescent; oral articulation requires its own vanishing to become sensible. We discern spoken words from the silence that separates them. The text is a fabric—literally “woven,” from the Latin textus. We may trace our finger back over the letters like a trail of clothing through a house.
Women and inconspicuousness share a difficult legacy. “Inconspicuous” sounds too much like “private,” that is, domestic, un-public. But women also have the legacy of being noticed for the wrong reasons, such as the length of their skirts or apparent “availability,” which morphs into “deviance” as they grow older. My thinking around books and aloneness arose, in part, through a conversation with my friend Kasia van Schaik. In her own essay on the subject, Kasia quotes Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: as single women enter their thirties, “female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.” Though this may be so, I would add that single women in their teens or twenties exude a scent too: one of unconquered territory. If my solitude smells stranger now that I have entered my thirties, I am oblivious to its odor. This may shift as I grow older, but so far, the prospect of aging on my own doesn’t disturb me. I’ve always identified with the virgins and spinsters who never married, such as Jeanne d’Arc, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Harper Lee. I do not (yet) experience solitude as lack. However—and this is a big however—I know we do our best growing, learning, and sacrificing when we share our lives with other people. That, and a coupled person is often more secure in times of emergency, so long as the partnership itself doesn’t engender emergency, as in situations of abuse. In The Undying, Anne Boyer demonstrates that “unmarried women have a greater risk of dying from their breast cancer…and of not receiving adequate care for it…. Unmarried breast cancer patients who live in poor neighborhoods have the lowest survival rate of all.”
If you can barely stand, who drives you to treatment? If you’re so dehydrated from treatment that you can’t remain conscious, who checks to make sure you’re still breathing? If you’re too weak to prepare your own food, who feeds you? Who helps you fill out insurance or disability forms when you can’t, physically, behold a screen? To say nothing of the emotional support every human deserves as they face the sudden imaginability of their own non-existence.
It takes a global pandemic to distribute this concern to the wider population. As the safer families and couples tuck into insular quarantine units, many of my single friends have expressed unease with their solitude—especially when they, themselves, fall sick. Never have my (strong, independent, intelligent, feminist, twenty-first-century) friends discussed marriage as a tactical decision before now.
So it’s a sign of privilege to choose solitude. It indicates health, for one, and material sufficiency. As mentioned, privilege accompanies anonymity too: one I possess as a white person in my city. No one crosses the road to avoid me at night. No one asks if they can touch my hair. No one questions what I’m doing on a university campus, though I haven’t been a student in three years. The costume of anonymity shifts with one’s environment, of course. Only when my own anonymity is ruptured do I remember the privilege to go unseen. Such ruptures feel like a disrobing—the ambush of attention that follows queefing in a yoga class, for example, or entering a bar populated only by men. Privilege haunts visibility too—whose suffering do we hear about? Whose do we tolerate (or choose not to see)? Who feels their vote matters? Who speaks on the news? Who speaks in a classroom as the instructor and which students? And so on, infinitely. It’s a political question: who we see and don’t see. Yet inconspicuousness remains a condition I have wanted, now and then, after a breach in my own hiding.
There is a virtual equivalent to entering a bar populated only by men—it happens when I research a subject online and accidentally stumble onto Reddit. Indeed, this occurred while googling “inconspicuous women” for this essay. One of the first hits directed me to a subreddit on the TV series Mr. Robot, which is about a “young anti-social computer programmer” who works as a cybersecurity engineer by day and a vigilante hacker by night. The original poster remarks on a character whom IMDb credits as “Inconspicuous Woman” (that is, “Inconspicuous Woman” as a proper noun on a film script, like “Cab Driver,” or “Girl #3”). He “can’t place her anywhere” and feels unsure whether this is “something to pay attention to.” The irony of his question as it pertains to my broader investigation, especially as I (inconspicuously) browsed a virtual room of men talking, felt too apt to ignore. A second poster says that if they have to ask “who is Inconspicuous Woman?” she’s obviously doing a fantastic job. A third contributor points out that IMDb also credits one “Suspicious Onlooker,” and they’re probably related.
There is something suspicious about the label “inconspicuous”—why is that? On a linguistic level, the words share an etymological root: *spek, which threads from the Sanskrit spasati (“sees”), to the Greek skopos (“watcher”), Latin specere (“to look at”) and German spähen (“to spy”). Sus-picion prefixes seeing with “under” or “behind.” When we feel uneasy, or suspicious, we look over our shoulder. Conspicuous means visible, or open to view, from com– (an intensive prefix) + specere. The prefix “in-“ inverts the visibility. Inconspicuous Woman is the woman behind you or “under your nose” in the optometrist’s waiting room. When someone chooses to disappear, we ask why.
In recent years, a similar suspicion besets reading and thinking. During the 2016 Brexit referendum, Michael Gove declared Britain had “had enough of experts.” When Jim Vandehei asked what books Donald Trump kept on his nightstand, the President answered:
I like reading books. I don’t have the time to read very much now in terms of the books, but I like reading them. This one is just one that just came out. CNN. The CNN book just came out. I hear it’s doing well.
Government distrust of intellectuals is not new—those in power have often perceived writers and thinkers as threats, even in ostensibly democratic countries like the UK, US, and Canada. Perhaps public distrust of intellectuals isn’t a new phenomenon either, but it’s an issue to be taken seriously—not least because it exposes wider systems of marginalization that make education (and books) inaccessible or alienating to many people. It’s expensive to go to school. And it’s a privilege to read: to have the time (between jobs or raising kids), and to see your body, experiences, or interests, represented.
This is not the space to fully pursue either subject, but I want to pause on the distaste—or at least, impatience—for thinking and reading that has burgeoned, and in particular, the venom reserved for women who do their thinking conspicuously. The Guardian opens one article on Naomi Wolf with the following sub-headline:
The feminist beauty who has plundered her own life to produce bestsellers has been arrested over the Wall Street protests. Is this a new departure into genuine activism or yet more self-publicity?
Not only is Wolf defined, in the first, as a “beauty” who has “plundered” her “own life” (i.e., family life) to write (and, one assumes, read), the author frames Wolf’s less conspicuous activism (that is—her thinking and writing) as disingenuous until she gets arrested. But even then, her arrest may simply be a stunt to peddle more books.
Women who think and speak aloud have often been dismissed as attention-seeking—or as Jordan Peterson words it, “shrieking harpies of fairness and victimization.” According to Peterson, “we do not yet know how to balance the opportunities thus provided for expanded female individuality with the eternal necessity for a woman to serve as the Mother of the Divine Individual.”
A woman reading is not serving as Mother of the Divine Individual. A woman reading is not serving. Nor is she earning money, nor watching her children. Nor will she notice your advances. A woman reading does not answer you or to you. She is alone, yet unavailable, “at leisure,” and therefore indulgent. I have been told we are all selfish until we have children. Yet a woman who trades procreation for books is somehow more selfish than childless men, or her selfishness is biologically deviant. When we read, we enter a world that excludes everyone else. Is that indulgent? Maybe. It’s certainly a privilege. But perhaps it’s no more indulgent than love or friendship, and no less expansive.
Reading installs a field of attention that approaches (if inexactly, with diminished tactility and no exchange of pheromones) the space between two bodies. A further difference is this relationship is deferred in time, or perhaps operating outside time altogether. Books are inherently elegiac: unlike live speech, their articulation has always already departed. Yet books persist despite the mortality of the author: you may leave and return. Reading requires you to receive the text. And the text has no choice but to receive you. Neither of us speaks over the other or pretends to listen. Books offer companionship. They lend a room of one’s own in public spaces.
Only once I started to publish books myself did I consider the humility and trust of readers: to open yourself to another mind and devote time, many hours, to that mind’s unfolding. It’s a big ask to commit to a book. My feeling as a writer is wonder and gratitude. As a reader, it’s “well, duh.” I feel I’m taking, rather than giving, when I read. But as someone who inhabits both roles, I recognize they work in tandem. An intimate space opens between reader and text—it feels like confabulation; it feels like pillow talk. We intuit this intimacy when we see reading individuals on the bus and leave them alone. In my moments of retreat, a book restores a buffer of inconspicuousness. Though solitude is not always desirable, nor always safe, it can be a relief, now and then, to go unseen.