The American feminist essayist Vivian Gornick has experienced a renaissance in recent times as her musings about living a solo life have struck a chord with single millennials. Her latest memoir, The Odd Woman And The City, is now getting a UK and Ireland release 10 years after its American publication. This edition comes with a foreword by the English writer Amy Key, who has written her own memoir about life as a single woman, but Gornick and her gleaming prose need no introduction.
The single life is just one of the topics she explores in this pristinely written series of entertaining vignettes. First and foremost, this is an unashamed love letter to Gornick’s native New York City, in the vein of EB White’s Here Is New York. Not the glamorous cinematic New York but the ordinary, everyday New York, the one with big, wild personalities who have stand-offs on the downtown bus (Gornick is one of these personalities) and strangers who buoy each other with small, warm conversations while waiting in the pharmacy queue. Indeed, Gornick writes of how the city and its teeming inhabitants somehow make loneliness “bearable”.
Friendship is a prominent theme and her long-term friend Leonard features heavily here as a kind of comic sidekick, always ready with a witty retort.
The most affecting parts of the book come when Gornick turns her attention away from the strangers on the street and back to her favoured territory of gender inequality. She describes how her early attempts to overlay an ill-fitting template of romantic love on to her life saw two early marriages end in divorce, and in the process she quietly proves how ruinous social expectations of a coupled-up life can be. Later, her description of one partner’s sexually demanding and coercive behaviour is compelling as she calls it out as a process that some women “make peace with” but for her it was an “irritation of the soul that [she] could not accommodate”.
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Despite the downbeat nature of some of the subject matter, the overall tone of The Odd Woman And The City is uplifting. Gornick will turn 90 this year and her determined focus on her work and living an independent life on her own terms offers much reassuring evidence of just how fulfilling the solo life can be.
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