Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book proves something is changing for Gen X women.

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In the spring of 2024, Miranda July’s bestselling autofiction, All Fours, inspired a certain demographic of American women (nerdy, privileged, partnered, maybe a little dead inside) to admit to their salacious fantasies of leaving all things domestic behind. It was a millennial/Gen X Feminist Mystique moment—one of those times when a book breaks open a conversation about longing that has real-world consequences. In 2024, we also got trend pieces arguing that Gen X women were having the hottest sex, and a rash of movies featuring older actresses paired with handsome up-and-coming actors.

This fall, however, among my fellow fortysomething women, longing is looking remarkably different, in our public conversations and our private group chats. It’s not so much about a hot, young man as it is about a cold, old monastery. And, according to the literature du jour, we most deeply crave solitude, not sex.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, All the Way to the River, hit shelves this week. Its sexy, drug-filled twists and turns bring us to a place where Gilbert is alone, head shaved, talking to no one but the ghost of her dead lover and her dog, Pepita. Similarly, Melissa Febos’ The Dry Season, which dropped this summer, is about giving up the thing that had dominated the writer’s  thoughts for so long—sex—in order to see what lay dormant underneath. In Febos’ case, the experiment led her to swoon over nuns, like Hildegard of Bingen and the Belgian Béguines—a real departure for a woman whose first book was about her stint as a professional dominatrix.

Both Gilbert and Febos do rigorous self-accounting in their books, looking at all the ways in which they have lost themselves and harmed others while subject to the swirl of sexual chemistry. Disentanglement and sovereignty are the hard-earned codas. Febos writes, “Celibacy itself was not my work, anyway. It would simply make space for whatever that work turned out to be.”

As I read these books, I started to see the reaction to All Fours in a different light. The thing that my friends who gobbled the book up talked about most wasn’t the b-boy babe that the main character seduces during her time away from her family, but the motel room that she redecorates with her own damn money and revisits when she needs time and space to feel. Women in my social circles started plotting: Could we pool our money to rent an apartment, not to spend time together or with a lover, but to spend time alone? We could each get a certain number of nights a month and the chance to wake up at our own languid pace and do our own creative work.

We haven’t acted on it, but the fantasy is palpable; women, especially partnered and parenting, are desperate to be alone.

This fact is made even more striking when one considers the dominant cultural conversation about men at the moment: how epidemically lonely they are. I don’t need to belabor the statistics, because there’s no way you’ve missed them. They’re everywhere. I have even done my own reporting and writing on it. Men don’t want to go to bed or wake up alone; they want to do the exact opposite—to feel themselves playing a critical role in a family, a team, a company, anything that keeps the anomie at bay.

What does it say about our society that women are dying—metaphorically—to escape witness and responsibility, and men are dying—literally—to be seen and needed?

Well, for one thing, it says that we remain imbalanced as hell. Women continue to do the majority of unpaid care labor, leaving us rich in meaning and poor in time. According to a recent Pew study, whether women earn more than their husbands or not (and more and more of them do), they still do more household chores and caregiving. And according to the National Institutes of Health, 2.5 million people—most of them women—care for both aging parents and young children, earning them a cute moniker for an exhausting existence: sandwich generation caregivers.

When I recently told my therapist I was worried I might be depressed for the first time in my life, she said she would consider the idea, but first insisted that I spend a week alone, not caring for anyone. (I have spent the last year caring for my two young daughters and my dad, who has advanced dementia.)

Turns out, she was right. As I sat on the pebbly beach of the Russian River, watching a momma osprey dive for fish for her babies nestled up high on the top of an electric pole, I felt deeply happy not to be feeding anyone. With the rest of my family’s needs, wants, and feelings on mute, I could suddenly hear my own; some of it was sad, of course, but some of it was what I can honestly describe as euphoric.

When I told my divorced friends how surprised I was by the clarity I had after just 24 hours alone, they divulged that—as much as they miss their kids—this is the gift of shared custody; every week, they have a moment to tune back into their own radio frequency with no static. I flashed back to the rash of divorce memoirs that dominated the bestsellers list in 2024, like Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife and Leslie Jamison’s Splinters. Most of the allure of these wasn’t the promise of a better, future marriage, but a life of one’s own design entirely.

The unnamed protagonist of All Fours has a kid, as do Jamison and Lenz, but neither Gilbert nor Febos does. Gilbert does, however, get crushed by caregiving for her best friend turned lover, who is dying of cancer. She writes: “I took great pride during those first few months of Rayya’s disease in how good I was at being her caregiver. …This concentrated sense of purpose took me far away from any thoughts about the past or the future, took me out of self and landed me in a never-ending present moment, where I experienced a certain battlefield calm. … At times I felt that I was not even human anymore.”

Solitude restores our humanness. Even the timbre of my voice and the light in my eyes were different after a week alone.

The longing for solitude is absolutely about caregiving, but it’s not only about caregiving. And it is sometimes about men, but also about the broader experience of entwinement. After all, both Gilbert’s and Febos’ memoirs are largely about their relationships with women. The emotional overwhelm of being in a romantic relationship with anyone, male or female, can lead you to lose yourself, the way that your partner’s desires, limitations, and habits can so often feel like watercolor paint that has bled past your own porous borders. Where do you begin and they end? Was this the landscape of your life that you wanted, or have you compromised beyond recognition?

Men longing for more connection seem to exist in an arid landscape—a desert waiting for the rain in the form of a lover, friend, neighbor, collaborator, anyone that makes them feel tethered to the earth in some meaningful way. And yet, instead of pursuing those connections, they so often rely on the women around them to cultivate them—what the internet these days calls “mankeeping.” Or find false versions online where ties aren’t just weak, but so often hollow and toxic. Men have an unbearable-lightness-of-being problem, while women have a sense of being crushed by the weight of the world.

A subreddit sure as hell can’t keep you warm at night. Meanwhile, I have heard so many women describe sleeping alone in seductive terms—the stretch of their limbs, the autonomy of their bodies, the unbroken silence so rare and satisfying as to be erotic.

Solitude can also be liberating. See the deadpan humor of the We Do Not Care Club, where Melani Sanders has taken the perimenopausal internet by storm by making reports from her kitchen counter with a bonnet and multiple pairs of glasses on her head, saying things like: “We do not care about your drama. Just deal with that shit or walk away. If you don’t, we will.”

What unites all of these zeitgeisty flash points is one consistent thread: Women are questing for lives of genuine wholeness, where we can feel both the sacred entanglement with others (our kids, our partners, our parents) but also the freedom of bodily autonomy, a complete thought, a day or two of being unscheduled, unbossed, unwitnessed. As Febos writes of books and people, “As in love among humans, we cannot appreciate a text until we really see it, and in order to see it we have to get out of the way.”

When women get solitude, they can see themselves better, but also those around them.
I have been shedding the picture books from our house slowly but surely. My daughters are 9 and 11 now, and have long moved on to the drone of Diary of a Wimpy Kid audio books. Recently I pulled one of my favorite picture books off the shelves: unsubtly titled Leave Me Alone!—no, most certainly not the newer Dr. Becky title, but a 2016 Caldecott Honor book by Russian American writer Vera Brosgol.

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In it, an old woman dripping with children and trying to knit eventually loses it and screams “LEAVE ME ALONE!” before busting out of the house and going on an epic adventure to find peace and quiet. She tries the “deep, dark forest,” but a bear family crowds her out. She tries a small cave at the peak of a snowy mountain, but the goats find her. She even climbs all the way to the moon, but, of course, aliens beep and boop their way right into her sacred silence.

It isn’t until she slides down a wormhole in the space-time continuum and finds herself in a void—much like July’s decorated-to-taste motel room—that she can breathe a sign of deep autonomous relief. Febos writes of this kind of cosmic quality of solitude: “I had been kneeling before a locked door, peering through its keyhole into a single room. When I finally turned around, the whole world was behind me.”

The old lady returns to her brood eventually, and when she does, she brings the fruits of her solitude: sweaters for all the children. When I came home from my week alone, I had no sweaters, but I had plenty of goodwill and far less irritation as I went about the impossible business of being a sandwich-generation working woman. Brosgol is blessing us with the wisdom that it is not just women who are restored by some space and time to hear their own thoughts, make their own art, dream their own dreams—it is all of society.

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