The Odd Woman and the City

The first time I read Vivian Gornick's The Odd Woman and the City I was desperate for fellowship. I wanted to read an account of a life lived alone, specifically the life of a woman older than me. I hoped that it would recast my own experience of living alone - largely without romantic love - and the potential for its ongoingness, as a desirable, even honourable way of life. I assumed I'd be able to enlist myself as one of the 'Odd Women' Gornick sees herself as.

But I've come to believe that if you read Gornick in search of such fellowship you will be reading her wrong. Early in the book Gornick says to her friend Leonard (a man 'sophisticated about his own unhappiness') 'I'm not the right person for this life' and this confusion and shock of being at odds with how she thought her life would turn out suffuses the text. Some years ago, as my contemporaries eagerly shared and wrote essays, books and poems about early motherhood, motherhood and madness, motherhood and creativity, marriage and divorce and the trials of heteronormative traditions, I was left wondering what there was for me - no partner, no kids, approaching middle age. Where was the literature that would help me feel seen? Where could I find the intellectual engagement with my situation and my story, that might enliven it? I freighted The Odd Woman and the City with my concerns of loneliness and alienation, and because I so desperately wanted to find the canon of literature about women 'like me' I didn't appreciate I'd inadvertently narrowed the scope of The Odd Woman and the City's interests.

As someone who writes about how to make a life alone, a life where romantic love is not at the centre of my plan-making, I've occasionally worried I might make a reputation for myself as a patron saint of singledom. It occurs to me that despite myself I've made Gornick one. Take this passage:

As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy, and sentiment.

It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones; so deeply embedded in the makeup of the spirit, it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence. It would be a cause of pain and conflict for the rest of my life. I prize my hardened heart - I have prized it all these years - but the loss of romantic love can still tear at it.

Romantic love tore at me too, and it still does. How profoundly to heart I took her words: it wasn't just me! I found a strange courage in Gornick's disclosure. I needed the absence of romantic love to be a serious subject, worthy of discussion, and for a life without it to be deemed worthy. If someone as acclaimed, as intelligent and (crucially!) as old as Gornick could write about it, surely I could overcome my reticence to 'come out' as someone whose life has been marked by prolonged romantic lovelessness. I didn't have to pretend I was OK with it, force myself into a position of either the hungry pursuit of love or absolute rejection of it. Gornick would allow me my grievance, allow the soft longing inside my brittle defences; I was suddenly able to engage directly with my conflict. In an essay for BOOKFORUM on the legacy of the 1970s women's movement Gornick wrote of her contemporaries: 'in our pain and anger at having been denied . freedom, we often turned recklessly on these conventional wisdoms . No equality in love? We'll do without!' But she now understands the 'no man's land' between rhetoric and desire, recalling that 'every one of us became a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the place in which we were to find ourselves time and again'. My heart isn't hardened, but she helped me to understand that I can value my life as it is, alongside letting myself be vulnerable to the influence of romantic love on my nervous system. I can prize a sense of 'useful solitude' where I keep 'myself imaginative company, breathing life into the silence, filling the room with proof of my own sentient being'.

One of my greatest fears is that without romantic love in my life, I might never be truly known or seen. In time I've come to realise this is not and will not be the case, but I did want to appreciate more the way in which being unpartnered, being an Odd Woman, could be valuable as a status that promotes a solitude with the potential for richness of inner life. Gornick writes of the unmet desire for romantic love so powerfully that on first reading I left the book with only certain refrains in my head. I misremembered it as a book about 'capital L Love'. I've re-read The Odd Woman and the City several times since and with each reading new insights - and affinities - are revealed to me. In her book Taking a Long Look, Gornick writes about a memoir-reading group she belonged to: 'Every book has its poetic respondent among us, the one for whom the book, whatever its shortcomings or eccentricities, delivers an inner clarity that resonates in that part of the expressive self where intelligence serves sensibility.' I am one of The Odd Woman and the City's multitude of poetic respondents.

*

Gornick sees The Odd Woman and the City as having 'three strands of concern': friendship (a specific one with Leonard, but also friendship more generally), New York City, and 'an attempt to account' for herself 'as a late twentieth-century feminist'. Of the three it is New York City that she sees as most important; the city outguns both friendship and Gornick's desire to account for herself, much like how, for her, it was radical feminism not class that ultimately gave her the point of view from which she writes, and in finding that point of view she was able to make her name as a writer of 'personal criticism'. She had 'a great desire' to add herself 'to the literature of the urban'. Gornick writes that 'you've got to love the movement' of the streets in New York City. The streets have a rhythm, with a storyline that moves fast, one she was born to keep up with. The text - with its fragments, dialogues, shifts in time and location - has the rapidity of a city that is always changing, that is raucous and populous, alive with noise, jokes, grief, embraces, stinks, sweet scents, violent changes in weather and misunderstandings. Her narrative constantly elbows forward, and we are encouraged to match its sudden shifts in pace: we come to an abrupt halt on the street, we rest on a bench in a park, we stand in line at the library and pharmacy, we're at the theatre or dinner or on the train or the bus or striding through rush hour or strolling in the early evening. As we move through the book and the streets, we encounter scenes at odds with New York's fabled glory, we confront Gornick's New York, one of 'melancholy . where none of us are going anywhere, we, the eternal groundlings who wander these mean and marvellous streets in search of a self reflected back in the eyes of the stranger'.

Spending a June evening in Washington Square Garden, Gornick reflects on all that has changed since she was young. She thinks back to the beauty she found on those 'sweet summer evenings'. Now everything she knows is 'etched' on her face, she sees the square as it is, not as it once was. She describes herself as being 'at one' with the city, nostalgia for its past no longer has 'authority' over her. 'I have lived out my conflicts not my fantasies, and so has New York' she writes. I had that line in my head when I recently returned to a part of London I've avoided for two decades. As I sat on a bus that took me up a hill and then down into a small, moneyed neighbourhood where I worked in my early twenties, a place mentally tethered to a doomed love affair that I have never quite abandoned, I felt the anxiety of renewed engagement with a fantasy, but after some hours there this feeling was neutralised. I thought that perhaps I'd meet myself again, the me of my youth, and absorb some of her boundless, aching hope. Not finding myself there beyond the first fleeting moments of remembrance felt sad, but I was able to leave the fantasy behind and allow only the place to remain.

Born in 1935 in New York to working-class Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Gornick went on to become a journalist at the Village Voice reporting from 'the barricades of radical feminism', an influential critic and the writer of several books of criticism and essays, including two astonishing memoirs. Her first, Fierce Attachments, about her relationship with her mother and the shocking realisation that she had 'become' her mother, was published in 1987 and in 2019 the New York Times named it the best memoir of the past fifty years. The Odd Woman and the City, published in 2015, was her second. Gornick describes the book as a collage; it is a story she composed from over thirty years of notes and essays to create a text that feels as though the events described in it...