Odd Woman and the City

“Funny and elegiac and truth-dealing. . . . Ms. Gornick gets into the fat of feeling. She is as good a writer about friendship as we have.” —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 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. 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.

“Stirring.” —Los Angeles Times

“The best books . . . make us feel understood. . . . The Odd Woman and the City can be read as a guidebook for how to exist.” —Los Angeles Times Review of Books

“Sharply observed.” —The New Yorker

“One of the most vital and indispensable essayists of our cultural moment.” —Phillip Lopate