There are four main characters in Vivian Gornick’s memoir “The Odd Woman and the City”: Gornick, her mother, her dear friend Leonard, whom she describes in the book’s opening salvo as “a witty, intelligent gay man, sophisticated about his own unhappiness.”
The fourth character is there in the title — it’s the city itself. As a memoir from and of New York, “The Odd Woman and the City” is a collage of tales of all sizes from a lifetime in the city, a mosaic composed of photos taken in snippets of conversation, sometimes with friends, sometimes overheard, mostly from street level.
“On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need—,’ he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, ‘I just had my pocket picked!’ The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, ‘Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.’ “
The stories of Gornick’s experiences, like this one, are dropped throughout the book — amid a tale about a call with Leonard, a solo walk, a chat with her mother, a remembrance about an acquaintance (maybe one she didn’t like very well), a few paragraphs about a Robert Capa photo she has pinned above her desk. As singularities, these micro essays sometimes leave the reader with a vaguely uneasy feeling: Why did she respond that way? What does it mean? But keep reading. Collected, the macro effect is a broader sense of the complexities of relationships, of city life, of the writer’s heart and mind.
Gornick explores the ebb and flow of relationships with a blunt yet emotionally deft hand. Friendships form and fade; this is part of life. “I had a friend once with whom I was certain I would grow old.” She drinks in lovers, then, when the taste becomes bitter for both, spits them out. A man she knows from her childhood in the Bronx surges into her adult life, sweeping her up until it all somehow becomes too much. For both of them. It’s what has to happen.
The stories about her mother are fraught with decades of baggage. When her mother has heart surgery, she “emerged from the operation in a state of calm I’d never known her to possess. Criticism and complaint disappeared from her voice, grievance from her face.” This altered state of being shifts the mother-daughter relationship a degree. “I nearly weep,” Gornick writes. “All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am still certain that if she had been, I’d have grown up whole inside.”
But there’s beauty and wry humor as well. That passage about her mother ends with a quip from Leonard, who often provides sharp words that cut through thick emotions. Memoirs often need themes (like relationships, and life in New York) to help mold the narrative into a cohesive shape, and because this memoir’s shape is a collage, it can feel disjointed at times — until a familiar character reappears. The narrative always settles a bit when Leonard pops up in the story as a dry, witty signpost, holding the totality of the story together. So at the end of the book, at the end of a day when a stranger pulls Gornick out of a crosswalk in rush-hour traffic, saving her from an oncoming truck, it’s fitting that she recognizes the wonderful relationship she has with the people of New York — all of them — but then looks at her clock and thinks, “It’s time to call Leonard.”
Jenn Fields: 303-954-1599, jfields@denverpost.com or
NONFICTION: MEMOIR
“The Odd Woman and the City”
by Viviam Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
