In this gripping collection of personal essays, Gornick (How I Found America, LJ 7/91) delves beneath the surface of individual, community, and work. With honesty and insightfulness, she reflects on our fear of loneliness and sense of fragmentation and the survival techniques she and others employ at work and home. Gornick takes the reader with her for walks on New York City streets; onto academic campuses in New York, California, and New England; and to the Catskills, where she works. Gornick's clear writing and honest expression of her own need for personal connections, independence, and meaningful work make the reader feel like a participant-observer in all her experiences and personal encounters. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.
In these essays, journalist and essayist Vivian Gornick (Fierce Attachments, 1987) bravely facesand, even more remarkable, clearly rendersloneliness and the ongoing search for human connection.
Gornick brings us out on the striving, bustling streets of Manhattan, where she often finds herself walking, seeking a kind of company in the anonymous crowd. We follow her, too, into stifling, backbiting university communities where she has spent time as a visiting writing teacher, and to the Catskills, where, working as a waitress, she learned brutal lessons about human nature. She meditates painfully on a brilliant woman writer, a friend of hers, now dead, who was loved, even worshiped, by many people, yet spent her life evading intimacy. Gornick also devotes an essay to living alone; rethinking a dogmatic devotion to solitudeshe once wrote a polemic called "Against Marriage"she ponders the ways in which, post-divorce, she has never really learned to live by herself. She is courageous in these pieces, both in what she will say and in what she is willing to see. Throughout, she beautifully articulates, from a feminist perspective, her struggle to work and create, and to from meaningful relationships with others. The collection's themes come together in a final essay on letter writing, in which she argues, that, though many complain that the telephone has killed the letter, both represent vital parts of life: the impulses to connect and to narrate. Gornick argues eloquently against choosing one form of expression over the other, though this essay is a little dated now that so many people, through e-mail, are charting a new course somewhere in between.
Though Gornick's standards for quality conversation are higher than most people'shence her vulnerability to the isolation that accompanies its absenceher hunger for connection and understanding resonates and inspires. Her prose is sharp and her characterizationsof her friends, modern life, and of herselfring true.
"It is [Gornick's] particular genius to make readers feel what they are thinking . . . Brilliant, compelling, and cohesive." —Julia Markus, Los Angeles Times
"There's more to these seven original essays than a hymn to Manhattan. There is also exploration of that most brutal and unconquerable of human sorrows, loneliness . . . Without even a flicker of self-pity, these short pieces bear rereading many times." —Publishers Weekly
"At heart this is a book not about repose but about escalating struggle—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." —Mary Hawthorne, The New York Times