The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir
by Vivian Gornick
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Description
"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 show more 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"-- show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
pbirch01 Both are deeply personable yet highly readable journeys through the inner thoughts and feelings of the author set against a backdrop of New York City.
20
pbirch01 Both primarily concern the joy and serendipity found when walking around a large city such as New York
JuliaMaria Memoiren von Feministinnen, mit der Stadt als wesentlichem Element der Beschreibung.
Member Reviews
My third Gornick and I just have to ask myself, what took so long to find her? Like Laing, she writes about people and how they interact. Gornick lives in NYC and walks the streets of the city to find so many interesting things to talk about. As she walks, she absorbs the drama, humor and humanity on the streets and writes about it using absolutely beautiful prose. On top of that she throws in discussions about authors that I love and authors I would like to get to know. I now know I have to read George Gissing's The Odd Women and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. And every book she writes is like that. Highly recommended.
Vivian Gornick le pone palabras a todo consiguiendo descubrirnos una especie de lenguaje oculto en el que comprendemos muchos de nuestros sentimientos, actitudes, aciertos y errores.
Siguiendo un poco la línea de Apegos feroces, la autora sigue recorriendo la ciudad, esta vez sin su madre, aunque esta sigue presente en algunos de los pequeños episodios en los que se organiza esta pieza literaria.
Recorriendo su ciudad, Nueva York, nos habla de historia, de su vida, y sobre todo de literatura. A veces los personajes literarios parecen más reales que la gente que conoce o con la coincide.
Gornick habla y habla sin parar y de vez en cuando nos da un puñetazo que nos deja k.o. hasta la siguiente revolución.
Es verdad que a veces se show more enrolla de forma innecesaria para explicar conceptos que puede que no tengan tanta trascendencia, pero una aclaración de vez en cuando tampoco viene mal.
Dice Gornick que no puede prescindir de las voces de su ciudad, que es un poco lo que nos pasa a nosotras cuando la leemos, porque ese “profuso delicatesen que tiene en su cabeza” es el lenguaje escondido con que ponemos nombre a mucho de lo desconocido que tenemos en las nuestras. Un placer. show less
Siguiendo un poco la línea de Apegos feroces, la autora sigue recorriendo la ciudad, esta vez sin su madre, aunque esta sigue presente en algunos de los pequeños episodios en los que se organiza esta pieza literaria.
Recorriendo su ciudad, Nueva York, nos habla de historia, de su vida, y sobre todo de literatura. A veces los personajes literarios parecen más reales que la gente que conoce o con la coincide.
Gornick habla y habla sin parar y de vez en cuando nos da un puñetazo que nos deja k.o. hasta la siguiente revolución.
Es verdad que a veces se show more enrolla de forma innecesaria para explicar conceptos que puede que no tengan tanta trascendencia, pero una aclaración de vez en cuando tampoco viene mal.
Dice Gornick que no puede prescindir de las voces de su ciudad, que es un poco lo que nos pasa a nosotras cuando la leemos, porque ese “profuso delicatesen que tiene en su cabeza” es el lenguaje escondido con que ponemos nombre a mucho de lo desconocido que tenemos en las nuestras. Un placer. show less
My first completed book of 2017! Vivian Gornick, where have you and your clear, perfect prose about living and growing older and cities and friendship and great books and all the important shit ever been my whole life?
Friends, you must read this. Immediately. Go on. Now. I'll be here impatiently playing with a yo-yo and buying everything Ms. Gornick has ever set down on paper.
Friends, you must read this. Immediately. Go on. Now. I'll be here impatiently playing with a yo-yo and buying everything Ms. Gornick has ever set down on paper.
This is a brief but wonderful reflection on living in New York City, on living alone and on the author's friendship with Leonard, who she has met weekly for many years to share dinner and a movie. Sensitive, thoughtful and funny: who could ask for anything more?
Enjoyed this so much. I don't often read memoirs, but this was elegant and wise and a pleasure to read. I appreciated the author's account of her rich intellectual life and her musings on friendship and love. Carefully crafted, searingly honest, thoughtful reflections on her life in New York. It was clear from the beginning that every thought Gornick shared, no matter how small, had been mulled over many times before committed to the page. A real tonic to read.
I love Gornick's love of NYC, her long walks all over the city, the snatches she records of verbal exchanges on the streets, sketches of her recent and current life. To me, the best was her aperçu about a poetry reading by a former Public Theater actor/friend, who had fought back from aphasia to perform once in his apartment for friends. A short book, but moving.
This is a quite short and sweet autobiography, based on thoughts, not on chronology, which serves the author right. Her quite recent interview in The Paris Review serves this book well.
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
A lot of her reflections are mini-monographs, like counts one does most often not write down:
There are quite a few quotes here, which isn't at all wrong; I mean, they serve a purpose as well as obviously having meant something to Gornick:
All in all, I think this memoir - mind you, it's not an autobiography - should have been reined in more, but then again, that would probably have steered the reader from Gornick's style, which is quite rewarding. show less
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. I’d not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a fewshow more
years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
A lot of her reflections are mini-monographs, like counts one does most often not write down:
Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didn’t know (me) to a man I also didn’t know (the figure on the wedding cake).
There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule. I used to think this distinction more a matter of one-on-one relationships than I now do. These days I look upon it more as a matter of temperament. That is, there are people who are temperamentally inclined to be enlivened, and others for whom it is work. Those who are inclined are eager to feel expressive; those for whom it’s work are more receptive to melancholia. New York friendships are an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive. The pavements are filled with those longing to escape the prison sentence of the one into the promise of the other. There are times when the city seems to reel beneath its impact.
There are quite a few quotes here, which isn't at all wrong; I mean, they serve a purpose as well as obviously having meant something to Gornick:
“Every man alone is sincere,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins … A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature.”
All in all, I think this memoir - mind you, it's not an autobiography - should have been reined in more, but then again, that would probably have steered the reader from Gornick's style, which is quite rewarding. show less
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Author Information
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Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City and the classic text on writing The Situation and the Story.
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Eine Frau in New York
- Original title
- The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir
- Original publication date
- 2015
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA
- First words
- Leonard and I are having coffee at a restaurant in midtown.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)It's time to call Leonard.
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Reviews
- 18
- Rating
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- Languages
- 8 — Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
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