: Vivian Gornick
: The Odd Woman and the City A Memoir
: Daunt Books
: 9781914198977
: 1
: CHF 9.70
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 184
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.' Set in New York, 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. Running through the book is Vivian Gornick's animated exchange of more than twenty years with her best friend Leonard, as well as interactions with grocers, doormen, people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. A narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, in this memoir we encounter Gornick's rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

Vivian Gornick is the author of numerous books, including the acclaimed Fierce Attachments, named the best memoir of the past fifty years by the New York Times Book Review in 2019, and the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. The Odd Woman and the City was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for the Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times,, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, and many other publications.

The first time I read Vivian Gornick’sThe Odd Woman and the City I was desperate for fellowship. I wanted to read an account of a life lived alone, specifically the life of a woman older than me. I hoped that it would recast my own experience of living alone – largely without romantic love – and the potential for its ongoingness, as a desirable, even honourable way of life. I assumed I’d be able to enlist myself as one of the ‘Odd Women’ Gornick sees herself as.

But I’ve come to believe that if you read Gornick in search of such fellowship you will be reading her wrong. Early in the book Gornick says to her friend Leonard (a man ‘sophisticated about his own unhappiness’) ‘I’m not the right person for this life’ and this confusion and shock of being at odds with how she thought her life would turn out suffuses the text. Some years ago, as my contemporaries eagerly shared and wrote essays, books and poems about early motherhood, motherhood and madness, motherhood and creativity, marriage and divorce and the trials of heteronormative traditions, I was left wondering what there was for me – no partner, no kids, approaching middle age. Where was the literature that would help me feel seen? Where could I find the intellectual engagement with my situation and my story, that might enliven it? I freightedThe Odd Woman and the City with my concerns of loneliness and alienation, and because I so desperately wanted to find the canon of literature about women ‘like me’ I didn’t appreciate I’d inadvertently narrowed the scope ofThe Odd Woman and the City’s interests.

As someone who writes about how to make a life alone, a life where romantic love is not at the centre of my plan-making, I’ve occasionally worried I might make a reputation for myself as a patron saint of singledom. It occurs to me that despite myself I’ve made Gornick one. Take this