Most of the people I write about are no longer with us. And when I began my research for the post about Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman five years ago, I assumed she was, too.
Instead, I discovered that she was not only alive but was still on her quest to carve out a place for herself in the world as a solitary woman, a woman not tied to marriage, family, job, or place but only to her own need to find meaning in our world. She was a Diogenes of our time — except her search was not for an honest man but for the purest level of self-honesty. Unfortunately, this is not a kind time for a Diogenes. Rent, food, taxes, cards of identity, and the fact that our world today requires one thing foremost of a person — a fixed address — all worked against her.
Nor was her quest free of other complicating factors. These were hinted at in An Unknown Woman but more obvious in its sequel, The Stations of Solitude (1990). She cut ties with her family in Ohio over wrongs that may have been more perceived than real. She got jobs with her exceptional intelligence — she had a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard — and lost them over her unwillingness to comply with institutional norms. When she grew uneasy with her connections to a place, she would load up whatever junky car she had and head for another place. Even the website she set up some years ago required the help of a friend in Colorado and once set up, she tended not to respond to people who wrote her through the contact form it provided.
Berkeley librarian Francisca Goldsmith noted the problem in her Library Journal review of The Stations of Solitude. Koller, she wrote, seems to “take pride in her independence but complains when others have not come to her assistance as thoroughly as she believes they might.” As a result, Goldsmith wrote, Stations “is a disappointing book, primarily because Koller seems to be writing for herself, failing to invite readers into her exclusive domain of solitude.”
In An Unknown Woman, Koller acknowledged the paradox she embodied. She was engaged, she wrote, in a battle: “I’m defending, and laying siege, all at once.” “I’m even the prize,” she joked — “But I’m also the only one who’d want it.” Koller understood — and accepted the consequences of her honesty. Honesty may indeed be the best policy, as the saying goes, but as another saying goes, the truth hurts. Alice Koller’s life in some ways is testimony to the cost of honesty when taken to its extreme.
I first heard from one of Alice Koller’s death in Trenton, New Jersey last month from one of her relatives, Akiva Fox. I was hoping someone would publish her obituary but was about to give up hope when I was contacted by Penelope Green, who was looking for details on Alice’s life in preparation of her New York Times obituary. That obituary is now online and well worth reading. I also recommend that anyone interested in Alice’s life read the profile that Judy Flander first published in the Washington Star in 1977 — five years before the publication of An Unknown Woman.
Ave atque vale.