In an essay called “The Family: Love It or Leave It,” from 1979, my mother characterized the six years she spent without a partner in her thirties as “neither an accident nor a deliberate choice,” but rather evidence of feminism’s success: “The sense of possibility, of hope for great changes, that pervaded those years affected all my aspirations; compromises that might once have seemed reasonable, or simply to be expected, felt stifling. . . . For me the issue was less the right to be alone, in itself, than the right to take as much time and room as I needed to decide what kind of life I wanted, what I could hold out for.”