RaveThe Brooklyn RailVivian Gornick’s new memoir, The Odd Woman and The City, explores friendship and ageing, love and sex, aloneness and loneliness—how she became herself. This journalist, critic and writer steals from some of her own past writings, and these nonlinear marginalities become an ode to New York. It is her loosest and sexiest work to date ... In each of [her] works she is a different writer: a daughter, a feminist, a reader. In The Odd Woman and The City she is all of these at once and more: a sensualist, a fighter, an intellectual, and she reveals herself to be at once stronger and more vulnerable for it ... She has written here a book for those of us who need a new narrative, refracting and reflecting the urban landscape. Her voice is ambivalent, searching, always thinking on the page...Her ruminations on aloneness and human connection stay with me, wondering how we are alone together, why our attractions often repel ... Gornick writes lovingly and excitingly ... Gornick lays herself bare for our pleasure and gives us strength to continue being the Odd Women that we are.
