Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
Vivian Gornick is a complicated woman, so it makes sense to me that my relationship with her writing would be too. At times she exasperated me and the literary language went over my head, and at others she inspired me with her crisp observations. She really did capture the essence of what New York is like, the strange minutiae of just walking about the city, and she made me miss it.
I loved this little book. Gornick’s observations on friendship and living in the city really spoke to me, as well as her feelings about the men in her life and sex as a personal concept. I did find at times she was weirdly fixated on race, and hers is quite a white, privileged perspective, but I found so much to love in this overall, and I know I’ll be delving back in to read passages that especially resonated with me.
A wonderful love letter to NYC, filled with glorious snippets of street life, ruminations on love and friendship and infused with Gornick's witty, smart and big-hearted sensibility.
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Vivian Gornick is a memoirist, biographer, historian and essayist, her memoirs more readable to the general reader. She turned 80 recently and in this gorgeous new memoir she mines a long life of experience and observation with a pen turned even sharper with age. Anyone with years, and a bit of grit, anyone with a penetrating curiosity and an appreciation for the eclectic, will love reading this book. If you also happen to come from or find comfort in the street life of New York City, the little book is a must read. If you are an aged feminist, all the better. Multiple interesting characters and one charming, and touching, tale after another fill these pages, interspersed with the sarcasm and wit of conversations with her alter ego, a character named Leonard, [imagine the sharp-eyed Leonard Cohen channeling the jaded Oscar Wilde.] He forms a sort of chorus for Gornick’s reflections, and their shared despairs, a kindred New York spirit with an unembellished perspective that is often quite amusing and always enlightening.
"Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as 'new women', 'free' women, 'liberated' women--but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the 'odd' women.