{"id":15256,"date":"2023-06-27T07:11:29","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T06:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=15256"},"modified":"2023-06-27T07:11:30","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T06:11:30","slug":"are-we-the-books-we-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2023\/06\/27\/are-we-the-books-we-read\/","title":{"rendered":"ARE WE THE BOOKS WE READ?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

ARE WE THE BOOKS WE READ?      <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

asks Norman Warwick as he reads Vivien Gornick\u00b4s reading<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was born in 1935 and raised in the Bronx. After studying at university, she began writing at the Village Voice\u2014where she began to give the feminist movement a tone to become one of America’s most recognizable movers and shakers in this field\u2014and later in media such as The New York Times or The Nation. She is the author of a number of essays, critical texts, journalistic texts and memoirs, always from a clear gender perspective, which has been her key feature as a journalist and writer. Since Vivian Gornick received a bachelor of arts degree from City College of New York<\/a>, and in 1960 a master of arts degree from New York University<\/a>, she has written fifteen books. She recalls \u00b4being really impressed with the experience of reading\u00b4 by the book Little Women. \u00b4It went right into me,\u00b4 she says now. So come follow your art across the sidetracks and detours of cropwded bookshelves and we consider whether we define our own reading, or whether our own reading defines us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vivien Gornick (left and on our cover)<\/em><\/strong> was a reporter for the Village Voice<\/a> from 1969 to 1977. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times<\/a>, The Nation<\/a>, the Atlantic Monthly<\/a>, and many other publications. In 1969, the radical feminist group New York Radical Feminists<\/a> was founded by Shulamith Firestone<\/a> and Anne Koedt<\/a>; Firestone’s and Koedt’s desire to start this new group was aided by Gornick’s 1969 Village Voice<\/a> article, The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs. The end of this essay announced the formation of the group and included a contact address and phone number, raising considerable national interest from prospective members. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gornick has also published fifteen books; the most recent, The Odd Woman And The City, was published in May, 2015.  This was a contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments 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, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has taught writing at The New School<\/a>. For the 2007\u20132008 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University<\/a>, and in 2015 she served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the University of Iowa<\/a>‘s Nonfiction Writing Program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March 2021 Gornick was awarded the Windham\u2013Campbell Literature Prize<\/a> for nonfiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She spoke recently with The Guardian on their books pages about what she \u00b4learned from Natalie Ginzburg, the genius of Geoff Dyer\u00b4s comedy and why she think James Salter is over-rated-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The journalist and memoirist on learning from Natalia Ginzburg, the genius of Geoff Dyer\u2019s comedy, and why James Salter is overrated. A headline that said she \u00b4couldn\u00b4t finish Becoming. Michelle Obama\u00b4s book\u00b4, drew my attention to the article that actually then led me through sidetracks and detours around my own chosen reading to wonder  why we each read what we read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vivien herself was reading, around the time of the interview, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee<\/a>. (Penelope is shown left)<\/em><\/strong> \u00b4I had actually never read anything by Lee before,\u00b4 she told the Guardian. \u00b4I\u2019ve only read 50 or 60 pages, but her style is immensely appealing. The sentences are very simple, there\u2019s no fancy writing. Lee somehow puts things together in such a lively way that I feel as if I\u2019m listening to her. She hits that marvellous conversational style. I like Fitzgerald\u2019s work and it\u2019s a pleasure seeing how she developed. I\u2019m enjoying it very much\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book that \u00b4changed her life\u00b4 wasn\u00b4t read until she was in her thirties but as soon as she began to reading The Little Virtues<\/a> by Natalia Ginzburg<\/a>  she felt herself \u00b4deeply connected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It isn\u2019t that it\u2019s the greatest book in the world\u00b4, she told the newspaper, \u00b4but for me it was vital. I felt she was showing me the type of writer I had it in me to be. One of the essays, My Vocation, really hit the nail on the head. I identified profoundly with the way in which Ginzburg traced her own development as a non-fiction writer. It made me realise that it was only through this kind of writing I could employ my own story-telling gifts. I re-read it irregularly but quite a lot, and I\u2019m always amazed by what she is able to accomplish with the small personal essay\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vivien is not automatically an admirer of any work and feels \u00b4A Sport and a Pastime<\/a>\u00b4<\/a> by James Salter is immensely over-rated. I could have picked a hundred books (I feel that way about), but this is the one that has been stuck in my craw for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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She is, though, quick to praise where she feels it is deserved and names Out <\/a>Of Sheer Rage<\/a> <\/a> as a brilliant book. \u00b4For me\u00b4, she says, \u00b4the best thing he ever wrote. A little bit of genius, it made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many of us, of course, Vivien likes both books that make her laugh and those that make her cry, such asJust Mercy<\/a> by Bryan Stevenson<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00b4It\u2019s written by Geoffrey Dyer (right), <\/em><\/strong>an Ivy League-educated, middle-class black lawyer who went to work for a non-profit organisation set up to defend the people on death row in the south,\u00b4 Vivien explained in the Guardian. \u00b4It is the story of what it means to be on death row in Georgia and Alabama and is enough to break your heart fifteen times over. His description makes it sound like South Africa before apartheid was ended. A nightmare, but a wonderfully written book\u00b4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess all of us have encountered at least one book in which we never reached the final page. I was slightly surprised when I read  that Ms. Gornick\u00b4s nomination for this wooden spoon was Michelle Obama\u2019s autobiography, <\/a>Becoming<\/a>.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Yes, she\u2019s a very nice woman,\u00b4 she affirmed for The Guardian, \u00b4but I found the book tedious, and it just didn\u2019t hold my interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also names Thomas Mann\u2019s <\/a>The Magic Mountain<\/a> in the same category, though she has pangs of guilt about this, saying \u00b4I\u2019ve started it 100 times over \u2013 I just can\u2019t get into it. I always feel bad about that. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll try again.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She chooses carefully the books she buys as gifts for others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4This depends on who I\u2019m giving the book to. It\u2019s like giving any other kind of gift: you try to keep in mind what the recipient will like, not what you like\u00b4she explains. \u00b4However, it always has to be something I consider substantial. I would never give somebody the current fiction bestseller or anything like that. If I give a book, it\u2019s one that I value, but most importantly one that the other person will value too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vivien Gornick seems to have certainly followed her own sidetracks and detours through literature, as both writer and reader, since  the first book she ever read as a child, which she says wasLittle Women by Louisa May Alcott<\/a>.(left)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Our house was full of books and my parents encouraged me to read, but I don\u2019t remember any childhood stories like Winnie the Pooh<\/em>. I remember fairy tales like the Grimms\u2019, but the first time I was really impressed with the experience of reading was Little Women<\/em>. It went right into me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The book she turns to for comfort isThe Odd Women by George Gissing<\/a>.(cover shown right)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8There was a time,\u00b4 she admits, \u00b4when I read that book every six months, usually in the winter, for quite a number of years. It\u2019s a book that I treasure to this day.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Vivian Gornick\u2019s books include Approaching Eye Level<\/em> (Daunt). She<\/em> has received a Windham-Campbell prize 2021 for nonfiction. For further information about this year\u2019s recipients visit <\/em>www.windhamcampbell.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

also read<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vivian Gornick: \u2018Thinking is the hardest thing in the world’ | Essays | The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prime source for this article was a piece written by Vivian Gornick, for the Village Voice. Other attributions, where possible, have been made in the body in our tex.t<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images and photographs employed have been taken from on line sites only where  categorised as  images free to use.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a more comprehensive detail of our attribution policy see our for reference only post on 7th<\/sup> April entitled Aspirations And Attributions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15256"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15415,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15256\/revisions\/15415"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}