Vivian Gornick

"[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

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.

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.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of LoveAll narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading 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, or Marguerite Duras.This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

En Mirarse de frente, Gornick convierte el recuerdo de su experiencia como camarera en los Castkills no sólo en una agridulce aproximación al deseo juvenil y los trabajos veraniegos, sino en una indeleble toma de contacto con las desigualdades de clase y de género. Su periplo como profesora visitante por varias universidades estadounidenses le sirve para trazar una maravillosa y tragicómica radiografía del paisaje académico como suplicio para el espíritu: comunidades aisladas, con sus ritos y rencillas, con su peculiar dinámica de soledad y sociabilidad donde el alma se enmohece rodeada de seres sólo en apariencia afines. En estas irresistibles viñetas, Gornick vuelve a ofrecernos la singular mirada – valiente y feroz, empática y siempre de frente– con la que encara el mundo.

Continuación natural de «Apegos feroces», «La mujer singular y la ciudad» es un mapa fascinante y emotivo de los ritmos, los encuentros fortuitos y las amistades siempre cambiantes que conforman la vida en la ciudad, en este caso Nueva York. Mientras pasea por las calles de Manhattan, de nuevo en compañía de su madre o sola, Gornick observa lo que ocurre a su alrededor, interactúa con extraños, intercala anécdotas personales y piezas reflexivas sobre la amistad, sobre la a menudo irreprimible atracción por la soledad y sobre qué significa ser una feminista moderna. Estas memorias son el autorretrato de una mujer que defiende con ferocidad su independencia, y que ha decidido vivir hasta el final sus conflictos en lugar de sus fantasías.

Pocas veces en la literatura se ha retratado de manera tan humana, vital y honesta la relación entre una madre y su hija como en Apegos feroces, las memorias de la escritora y activista Vivian Gornick, ahora publicadas por primera vez en español desde que vieran la luz en inglés en 1987. Gornick, una mujer madura, camina con su madre, ya anciana, por las calles de Manhattan, y en el transcurso de esos paseos llenos de reproches, de recuerdos y complicidades, va desgranando el relato de la lucha de una hija por encontrar su propio lugar en el mundo. Desde muy temprano, Gornick se ve influenciada por dos modelos femeninos muy distintos: uno, el de su madre, una mujer neurótica, terca e inteligente que dedica toda su energía al cuidado de su familia, que coloca el amor en el centro de su existencia y renuncia a cualquier otro ideal; el otro, el de Nettie, la joven vecina apasionada, inexperta y dependiente, viuda y madre de un bebé, que sólo se siente segura frente a los hombres, consciente de que es sensualidad en estado puro. Ambas, figuras protagónicas en el mundo plagado de mujeres que es su entorno, representan modelos que la joven Gornick ansía y detesta encarnar, y que determinarán su relación con los hombres, el trabajo y otras mujeres durante el resto de su vida. Ésta es la historia de un vínculo delicado y fatigoso, de un nexo que define y limita al mismo tiempo, pero también es el retrato de una sociedad y una época, y una extensa meditación sobre la experiencia de ser mujer.

Vivian Gornick lleva años desarrollando un formidable diálogo entre la literatura y la vida. La escritora estadounidense alberga la convicción de que la lectura es una forma de autoconocimiento, y de que leer con la mirada adecuada puede ayudarnos a entender cómo llegamos a ser quienes somos y por qué son como son los tiempos en que vivimos. En este libro, Gornick aborda uno de sus asuntos favoritos, el amor romántico simbolizado por el matrimonio, y lo analiza como uno de los temas clave en la literatura del siglo xx. En un recorrido por la vida y la obra de algunos de los autores que más admira –como Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Grace Paley, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver o Jane Smiley–, la autora defiende que nuestro mundo ha cambiado y que el amor y el matrimonio han dejado de ser, en nuestra época, metáforas que representen adecuadamente la felicidad y la realización personal. Con la misma inteligencia, honestidad y agudeza que caracterizan su célebre libro Apegos feroces, e hilvanando una profunda reflexión que se hunde con elegancia tanto en el conocimiento como en lo vivencial, Vivian Gornick nos brinda un libro extraordinario que cuestiona el supuesto poder transformador del amor y nos revela que este, «como la comida o el aire, es necesario pero insuficiente: no puede hacer por nosotros lo que debemos hacer por nosotros mismos».

Elizabeth Cady Stanton—along with her comrade-in-arms, Susan B. Anthony—was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to equality uniquely American in character. Her writing and life make clear why feminism as a liberation movement has flourished here as nowhere else in the world. Born in 1815 into a conservative family of privilege, Stanton was radicalized by her experience in the abolitionist movement. Attending the first international conference on slavery in London in 1840, she found herself amazed when the conference officials refused to seat her because of her sex. At that moment she realized that "In the eyes of the world I was not as I was in my own eyes, I was only a woman." At the same moment she saw what it meant for the American republic to have failed to deliver on its fundamental promise of equality for all. In her last public address, "The Solitude of Self," (delivered in 1892), she argued for women's political equality on the grounds that loneliness is the human condition, and that each citizen therefore needs the tools to fight alone for his or her interests. Vivian Gornick first encountered "The Solitude of Self" thirty years ago. Of that moment Gornick writes, "I hardly knew who Stanton was, much less what this speech meant in her life, or in our history, but it I can still remember thinking with excitement and gratitude, as I read these words for the first time, eighty years after they were written, ‘We are beginning where she left off.' " The Solitude of Self is a profound, distilled meditation on what makes American feminism American from one of the finest critics of our time.