Den bästa memoar som skrivits de senaste 50 åren, enligt kritiker i New York Times.

”Svidande ärlig och burdus, rolig och förkrossande.”Borås tidning

”I sin memoar skildrar hon det snåriga förhållandet till modern och de egna svårigheterna med att få ihop arbete, kärlek och relationer. Och hon gör det med enastående klarsyn och briljans.”Ingalill Mosander, Aftonbladet

”Det här är en sällsamt levande skildring av en komplicerad mor-dotterrelation.”Vi Läser

Jag har inget gott förhållande till min mor, och när våra liv hopar sig över oss tycks det ofta försämras ytterligare. Vi är fångna i en trång sfär av intensiv och oavvislig förtrolighet. Under en följd av år sker en utmattning, ett slags uppmjukning mellan oss. Sen väller vreden fram igen, hetsig och otvetydig, rent erotisk i sin förmåga att pocka på uppmärksamhet.

Med Starka band inleder vi en större satsning på amerikanska Vivian Gornicks författarskap. Berättelsen om Vivian och hennes åldrade mor som promenerar runt Manhattan, grälar och surar, skrattar och minns, är bländande litteratur. Tillsammans återvänder de ofta i sina samtal till Bronx på 40- och 50-talet, där Vivian växer upp i ett hyreshus fullt av kvinnor, mestadels judisk arbetarklass med rötter i Östeuropa. Modern är intelligent och politiskt sinnad. Tidigare har hon organiserat för kommunistpartiet, nu är hon hemmafru. Inför dottern sjunger hon kärlekens och äktenskapets lov och talar ofta om vilken tur hon haft; samtidigt framstår hon som en stympad människa som domderar, fördömer och kritiserar. Moderns dominanta sätt präglar Vivian starkt, och långt efter att hon utbildat sig, blivit författare och kommit bort från sitt ursprung, ska hon leva i denna omöjliga relation, någonstans mellan hat och kärlek.

”trollbindande läsning. På en knivskarp och klar prosa genomlyser Gornick förhållandet till sin mor och ger minnesglimtar från barndomen i de judiska kvarteren i Bronx på 1950-talet. … Gornicks humoristiska och själv-rannsakande blick på sig själv, sin mor och livet de levt bär texten framåt.”Oline Stig – Tidningen Vi

”En påminnelse om det självklara - kvinnors rätt att välja sitt eget liv - behövs. Gornick säger det bättre än de flesta.”Barometern

”En utomordentligt rolig och skarpsynt självbiografi som även omfattar livet i de judiska kvarteren i New York och det besvärliga med att vara kvinna.”Helhetsbetyg: 5. BTJ

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 inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. 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.

1987 skrev Vivian Gornick den bländande memoaren Starka band. Då var hon kring femtio. När hon skriver den andra delen av sitt liv har det hunnit bli 2015, världen är en helt annan, och Vivian Gornick själv är 80.

Den udda kvinnan och staden är hennes vidräkning med hur det blev. Livet som kvinna och intellektuell, vid en historisk tidpunkt då det blivit möjligt att välja bort barn och familjeliv och i stället välja autonomin, konsten – och ensamheten.

I bästa vännen Leonard, en bög som lyckas få sin olycka att framstå som raffinerad genom att vara kvick och vältalig, ser hon sin spegelbild.

Boken är en kärleksförklaring till den speciella livsform som bara finns i storstaden – att vara ensam i sällskap av främlingar – och ett fascinerande försök till självanalys. Varför är relationer så svåra? Hur lever man med andra människor, och med sig själv? Med New Yorks gatuliv som fond berättar hon om sina havererade äktenskap, sitt politiska uppvaknande, om vänskap, sex, skrivande och terapi – alltid med en stark känsla för sin plats i historien och vad hennes krav på att leva sant har kostat henne.

Vad kan samma text betyda när man är tjugo och förälskad, fyrtio och frånskild eller åttio plus och i ett tillstånd där man blickar tillbaka på livet? Helt olika saker, visar det sig.Vivian Gornick återvänder till böckerna som påverkat henne mest och följer sig själv som läsare genom åldrarna. I den föränderliga blicken på verken hon läser på nytt framträder hennes egen livshistoria: arbetarklasstjejen från Bronx som blev feminist, journalist och författare, som alltid drivits av att ifrågasätta och ompröva givna sanningar.På ålderns höst återkommer Gornick ofta i sina läsningar till människors kamp med kluvenheten inom dem: att vilja men inte kunna, att sitta fast, att vara avstängd från de känslor som ska hjälpa oss att uppleva livet fullt ut.

I Gornicks bibliotek finns Marguerite Duras och Natalia Ginzburg, D.H. Lawrence och Colette, Elizabeth Bowen och Doris Lessing, J.L. Carr och Pat Barker.

Med Aldrig färdig avslutar Vivian Gornick den löst sammanhållna trilogi om hennes eget liv som inleddes med Starka band och fortsatte med Den udda kvinnan och staden."Efter två hyllade böcker om sitt liv avslutar hon den löst sammanhållna trilogin med ytterligare ett insiktsfullt, välskrivet verk."Ingalill Mosander, Aftonbladet

"Hela hennes nya bok är ett hyllningstal till läsningen, den som får henne att 'känna kraften i Livet med stort L'."Maria Store, Smålandsposten

”Att som läsare ingå i dessa förväntningar väcker min läshunger. När jag efter drygt 150 sidor lägger ifrån mig Aldrig färdig är jag långt ifrån klar. Gornick har försett mig med en rad böcker att läsa eller läsa om - och goda anledningar att återbesöka favoriterna i min egen bokhylla.”Julia Svensson, Sydsvenskan

"För den som, precis som Gornick själv, ser litteraturen som en del av livet är detta förstås omistlig läsning. Men storheten ligger än mer i Gornicks förmåga att låta böckerna och hennes egen resa spegla varandra. Titeln är träffsäker; Aldrig färdig betyder både att den stora litteraturen tål att läsas om (och om igen), men kanske framför allt att man aldrig blir färdig med den personliga utvecklingen. Det är mästerligt fångat och förmedlat."5 av 5, BTJ

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature.

Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort.

Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that “ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman''s bitter birthright.” Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: “Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.” Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers—talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known—she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.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 principal 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.“[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters…[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, AutobiographyA contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce AttachmentsA 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.

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.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 principal 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.“[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters…[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times

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.

Den bästa memoar som skrivits de senaste 50 åren, enligt kritiker i New York Times.

”Svidande ärlig och burdus, rolig och förkrossande.”Borås tidning

”I sin memoar skildrar hon det snåriga förhållandet till modern och de egna svårigheterna med att få ihop arbete, kärlek och relationer. Och hon gör det med enastående klarsyn och briljans.”Ingalill Mosander, Aftonbladet

”Det här är en sällsamt levande skildring av en komplicerad mor-dotterrelation.”Vi Läser

Jag har inget gott förhållande till min mor, och när våra liv hopar sig över oss tycks det ofta försämras ytterligare. Vi är fångna i en trång sfär av intensiv och oavvislig förtrolighet. Under en följd av år sker en utmattning, ett slags uppmjukning mellan oss. Sen väller vreden fram igen, hetsig och otvetydig, rent erotisk i sin förmåga att pocka på uppmärksamhet.

Med Starka band inleder vi en större satsning på amerikanska Vivian Gornicks författarskap. Berättelsen om Vivian och hennes åldrade mor som promenerar runt Manhattan, grälar och surar, skrattar och minns, är bländande litteratur. Tillsammans återvänder de ofta i sina samtal till Bronx på 40- och 50-talet, där Vivian växer upp i ett hyreshus fullt av kvinnor, mestadels judisk arbetarklass med rötter i Östeuropa. Modern är intelligent och politiskt sinnad. Tidigare har hon organiserat för kommunistpartiet, nu är hon hemmafru. Inför dottern sjunger hon kärlekens och äktenskapets lov och talar ofta om vilken tur hon haft; samtidigt framstår hon som en stympad människa som domderar, fördömer och kritiserar. Moderns dominanta sätt präglar Vivian starkt, och långt efter att hon utbildat sig, blivit författare och kommit bort från sitt ursprung, ska hon leva i denna omöjliga relation, någonstans mellan hat och kärlek.

”trollbindande läsning. På en knivskarp och klar prosa genomlyser Gornick förhållandet till sin mor och ger minnesglimtar från barndomen i de judiska kvarteren i Bronx på 1950-talet. … Gornicks humoristiska och själv-rannsakande blick på sig själv, sin mor och livet de levt bär texten framåt.”Oline Stig – Tidningen Vi

”En påminnelse om det självklara - kvinnors rätt att välja sitt eget liv - behövs. Gornick säger det bättre än de flesta.”Barometern

”En utomordentligt rolig och skarpsynt självbiografi som även omfattar livet i de judiska kvarteren i New York och det besvärliga med att vara kvinna.”Helhetsbetyg: 5. BTJ

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 inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. 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.

1987 skrev Vivian Gornick den bländande memoaren Starka band. Då var hon kring femtio. När hon skriver den andra delen av sitt liv har det hunnit bli 2015, världen är en helt annan, och Vivian Gornick själv är 80.

Den udda kvinnan och staden är hennes vidräkning med hur det blev. Livet som kvinna och intellektuell, vid en historisk tidpunkt då det blivit möjligt att välja bort barn och familjeliv och i stället välja autonomin, konsten – och ensamheten.

I bästa vännen Leonard, en bög som lyckas få sin olycka att framstå som raffinerad genom att vara kvick och vältalig, ser hon sin spegelbild.

Boken är en kärleksförklaring till den speciella livsform som bara finns i storstaden – att vara ensam i sällskap av främlingar – och ett fascinerande försök till självanalys. Varför är relationer så svåra? Hur lever man med andra människor, och med sig själv? Med New Yorks gatuliv som fond berättar hon om sina havererade äktenskap, sitt politiska uppvaknande, om vänskap, sex, skrivande och terapi – alltid med en stark känsla för sin plats i historien och vad hennes krav på att leva sant har kostat henne.

Vad kan samma text betyda när man är tjugo och förälskad, fyrtio och frånskild eller åttio plus och i ett tillstånd där man blickar tillbaka på livet? Helt olika saker, visar det sig.Vivian Gornick återvänder till böckerna som påverkat henne mest och följer sig själv som läsare genom åldrarna. I den föränderliga blicken på verken hon läser på nytt framträder hennes egen livshistoria: arbetarklasstjejen från Bronx som blev feminist, journalist och författare, som alltid drivits av att ifrågasätta och ompröva givna sanningar.På ålderns höst återkommer Gornick ofta i sina läsningar till människors kamp med kluvenheten inom dem: att vilja men inte kunna, att sitta fast, att vara avstängd från de känslor som ska hjälpa oss att uppleva livet fullt ut.

I Gornicks bibliotek finns Marguerite Duras och Natalia Ginzburg, D.H. Lawrence och Colette, Elizabeth Bowen och Doris Lessing, J.L. Carr och Pat Barker.

Med Aldrig färdig avslutar Vivian Gornick den löst sammanhållna trilogi om hennes eget liv som inleddes med Starka band och fortsatte med Den udda kvinnan och staden."Efter två hyllade böcker om sitt liv avslutar hon den löst sammanhållna trilogin med ytterligare ett insiktsfullt, välskrivet verk."Ingalill Mosander, Aftonbladet

"Hela hennes nya bok är ett hyllningstal till läsningen, den som får henne att 'känna kraften i Livet med stort L'."Maria Store, Smålandsposten

”Att som läsare ingå i dessa förväntningar väcker min läshunger. När jag efter drygt 150 sidor lägger ifrån mig Aldrig färdig är jag långt ifrån klar. Gornick har försett mig med en rad böcker att läsa eller läsa om - och goda anledningar att återbesöka favoriterna i min egen bokhylla.”Julia Svensson, Sydsvenskan

"För den som, precis som Gornick själv, ser litteraturen som en del av livet är detta förstås omistlig läsning. Men storheten ligger än mer i Gornicks förmåga att låta böckerna och hennes egen resa spegla varandra. Titeln är träffsäker; Aldrig färdig betyder både att den stora litteraturen tål att läsas om (och om igen), men kanske framför allt att man aldrig blir färdig med den personliga utvecklingen. Det är mästerligt fångat och förmedlat."5 av 5, BTJ

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them. From an inmate struggling to find purpose during his prison sentence to a doctor coping with the unpredictable nature of her patient, to a widow wishing for just a little more time with her late husband, these narratives—and the others featured in this anthology—celebrate the endurance of the human spirit.

The Best American Essays 2023 includes Ciara Alfaro • Jillian Barnet • Sylvie Baumgartel • Eric Borsuk • Chris Dennis • Xujun Eberlein • Sandra Hager Eliason • George Estreich • Merrill Joan Gerber • Debra Gwartney • Edward Hoagland • Laura Kipnis • Phillip Lopate • Celeste Marcus • Sam Meekings • Sigrid Nunez • Kathryn Schulz • Anthony Siegel • Scott Spencer • Angelique Stevens • David Treuer

Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature.

Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort.

Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that “ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman''s bitter birthright.” Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: “Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.” Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers—talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known—she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.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 principal 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.“[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters…[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, AutobiographyA contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce AttachmentsA 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.

Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments—hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages—has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.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 principal 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.“[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others—at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters…[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she finds a language—original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities—worthy of the women that raised her.”—The New York Times

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.