Vivian Gornick

A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

A Memoir

The Odd Woman and the City

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother. Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre.

Fierce Attachments

Taking readers on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, and Marguerite Duras.

The Art of Personal Narrative

The Situation and the Story

One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”

Notes of a Chronic Re-reader

Unfinished Business

Apegos feroces

"For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing on writing from the course of her career, this book illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: the painful process of understanding one's self that binds us to the larger world"--

Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time

Taking a Long Look

"[Approaching Eye Level is] about the day-to-day struggle to face down the brutality of growing loneliness, to accept the limitations of friendship and intimacy, to honor the process of becoming oneself. . . . Vivian Gornick's strength lies in her refusal to give up."-Mary Hawthorne, The New York Times

Approaching Eye Level

The Romance of American Communism

Essays discuss Clover Adams, Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Grace Paley, and the nature of love

The End of the Novel of Love

Writer and critic Vivian Gornick’s long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life “Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public.

Mirarse de frente

Julia Osuna Aguilar

El fin de la novela de amor

Mirar-nos de cara

Przywiązania

Observaties, herinneringen en overpeinzingen van een welbewust alleenstaande vrouw, ooit rabiaat feministe, die alleen of met haar homoseksuele vriend en leeftijdgenoot New York doorkruist.

een memoir

Een vrouw apart. En de stad

Icône du journalisme en Amérique, Vivian Gornick a surtout connu le succès avec ses textes autobiographiques. Le plus « culte » , «Attachement féroce», publié en 1987, a connu un triomphe critique lors de sa parution en grand format en 2017 chez Rivages. Plus de 8000 lecteurs sont tombés sous le charme de ce livre. Dans la lignée de «L'Année de la pensée magique» de Didion ou de «Pourquoi être heureux quand on peut être normal ?» de Jeanette Winterson, Gornick s'empare d'un sujet universel : les relations mère-fille. Dès les premières pages, on tombe sous le charme de cette mère puissante et terrible. Vivian raconte l'amour fou qui les lie et leurs marches dans la ville. 

Attachement féroce 

Robert Atwan

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

The Best American Essays 2023

From the first appearance of the lead essay in this collection in 1969, Vivian Gornick established herself as one of the most respected voices in the new literature of contemporary feminism. Speaking always for herself, always maintaining her independence, while at the same time reflecting and commenting upon current feminist concerns, Gornick became one of the most eagerly read writers in The Village Voice, The New York Times and other periodicals. With characteristic passion and a quick, penetrating intelligence, she dissects the culture that is at the root of female oppression. This collection will stand as a permanent record of the evolution of one feminist's personal consciousness over the seven years that paralleled the renaissance of American feminism. These are essays to be read and reread for years to come, as both men and women begin to assimilate what we have all learned from the women's movement.--From publisher description.

Essays in Feminism

Bundel met korte, beschouwende en biografische studies van de Amerikaanse auteur Vivian Gornick (1935) over het thema van de liefde in de vooral Amerikaanse literatuur.

Vivian Gornick

Books

Your next favorite book is out there