It’s the birthday of poet and novelist May Sarton (1912-1995), known for writing about solitude, the many forms of love, and the search for self-understanding, topics she also explored in her highly popular journals. You think you know a thing or two about solitude? May Sarton ate solitude for BREAKFAST.

Sarton was born Eleanor Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium, but her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts when she was just four. She loved poetry from a young age, as did her mother; Sarton recalled her mother bringing a copy of Leaves of Grass from Belgium when they immigrated. Sarton did not attend college, which she called “a great piece of luck; this way, I’m ignorant but I’m fresh.” She pursued acting in the theatre but the companies she was with failed. In the late 1930s she published her first books of poetry, Encounter in April and Inner Landscape, and also her first novel, The Single Hound (1938). She taught writing and wrote reviews to support herself until 1945, when she began writing full time.

Sarton wrote many volumes of poetry, about 20 novels, and about 13 books of nonfiction and had a loyal readership, but struggled much of her life feeling that she did not receive the critical recognition she deserved; later in life, her reputation gained ground. Significant works include her poetry volumes The Land of Silence (1953), In Time Like Air (1958), and A Private Mythology (1966), and her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), in which Sarton came out as a lesbian and also considered the price a woman pays for being an artist. Her highly regarded and highly readable Journal of a Solitude (1973) explored her own experience of being a female artist. Sarton continued writing journals and poetry well into her old age; she died of breast cancer at the age of 83, and in her obituary the New York Times called her “the strongest of individualists” (Mel Gussow, “May Sarton, Poet, Novelist, and Individualist, Dies at 83,” 1995).

Sarton wrote: “Loneliness is most acutely felt with other people, for with others, even with a lover sometimes, we suffer from our differences, differences of taste, temperament, mood… I am lonely only when I am overtired, when I have worked too long without a break, when for the time being I feel empty and need filling up… Then for a little while the house feels huge and empty, and I wonder where my self is hiding. It has to be recaptured slowly by watering the plants, perhaps, and looking again at each one as though it were a person, by feeding the two cats, by cooking a meal.” (“The Rewards of Living a Solitary Life,” May 3, 1974, New York Times)

Take some good breaks for solitude today, water a plant or feed a cat, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.