Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 173 pp.

He strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette.

“I’m not the right person for this life,” I say.

“Who is?” he says, exhaling in my direction. (36)

Ten years ago this month, I reflected on the defeat of a local referendum to raise the library tax, and read Vivian Gornick’s celebration of life in New York City, while the world around me was showing gun violence, terror attacks, and anti-Muslim sentiment. This month, Cedar Rapids voted down bonds that would have funded public school capital projects (“Cedar Rapids Schools Thank” 2025), and a white nationalist cadre is fueling the Trump administration’s tear-gas attacks on American cities and terror campaign against immigrants (cf. Schulze 2025, Carrasquillo 2025). Seemed about time I revisited Vivian Gornick.

On second reading, her collage essays proved to contain so much more than I’d caught the first time through. She indeed celebrates the life around her in her long-time hometown, but out of need more than pleasure. Like Thomas Merton, her days have included both dark nights and promising dawns. Parker Palmer (2011: 36-38) would describe hers as a “heart broken open,” with love born from pain.

As I reread The Odd Woman and the City, I found myself underlining and circling, marking passages with abandon. It’s worth noting that I almost never do this. Some people do. U.S. President John Adams engaged in a running dialogue with whatever he was reading, at least once scrawling “Fool! Fool!!” at some work that displeased him. I wasn’t arguing with her, though, just trying to keep up with the numerous dimensions in her reflections, as she jumped around in time, and roped in exemplars from street people to other writers. There is so much I wanted to show you in this book that I didn’t discuss in 2015. It would probably be easier on you, me, and Gornick, though, if you just read it.

“The City” is, after all, only part of the title. “The Odd Woman” is Gornick herself, which she announces early (p. 4), but without telling us why or how. In time she tells us that, growing up in the Bronx, she and her friends were already walkers, and what she saw as she walked up and down the streets of Manhattan showed her what she anticipated would be her life (p. 11, p. 51). But it was not to be, despite advanced degrees, relationships, and jobs. She simply could not–would not?–fit in anywhere. Her longtime friend Leonard tells her:

*“Fifty years ago you entered a closet marked ‘marriage.’ In the closet was a double set of clothes, so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A woman stepped into a dress called ‘wife’ and the man stepped into a suit called ‘husband.’ And that was it. They disappeared inside the clothes. Today, we don’t pass. We’re standing here naked. That’s all.” *(36)

Freedom from traditional roles had become freedom from any role, intolerable because “no one wanted freedom” (p. 121), an insight she attributes to Henry James. She identifies with Mary Barfoot, the main character in George Gissing’s novel The Odd Woman; Rose, the mother in the musical Gypsy; and John Dylan, an actor whose stroke left him with a speech impediment that he used to disturbing effect in a public reading of a work by Samuel Beckett.

Gornick’s oddness, and her “inability to make peace with” herself (p. 19), is survivable only in the city. Walking becomes a sort of therapy once “nothing turned out as expected” (p. 14), but it is even more than that. It is her connection to people: Leonard, with whom she converses so intently that time becomes unreal (p. 17); the active residents of Manhattan’s West Side, which she prefers to the “calmer, cleaner, more spacious” East Side (p. 94); and even the men in line at a soup kitchen, who remind her of journalist’s line about “ruined faces worthy of Michelangelo” (p. 152). “It’s the voices I can’t do without” (p. 173), like the three she samples in rapid succession on pp. 37-38, but she is also comforted by all the nearby presences as she goes to bed at night (p. 21).

Along the way we meet her mother, ex-lovers, other friends, and any number of writers on these themes, including the poet Charles Reznikoff (p. 38), the novelist Isabel Bolton (p. 79; see also Bloom 2016), and Frank O’Hara, who wrote: I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people don’t totally regret life (p. 42). Once you allow for the possibility of oddness, it’s everywhere.

Gornick is still with us at 90; she turned 80 the year The Odd Woman and the City was published. In old age, she seems satisfied she’s figured out what her problem is. But it continues to be the people of her city who make the “odd” life satisfying. She concludes:

*I am home, having dinner at my table, looking out at the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I’d rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It’s time to call Leonard. *(175)

SEE ALSO: