RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe best books, like the best friends and their best emails, like the most intimate and comforting conversations, make us feel understood. They make us feel like home is home. The Odd Woman and the City can be read as a guidebook for how to exist: how to exist while walking on the streets in the city where you live, how to exist inside a friendship, at a bizarre dinner party, how to exist in a world of strangers close by. These kinds of books, when you find them — and they’re so rare — you must carry around with you all the time for months on end. But you must read them bit by bit, in tiny parts, so you don’t use them up too quickly. They’re still useful on second readings (and the third and fourth), but there’s nothing quite like the exhilaration of reading them for the first time ... It seems so obvious it’s embarrassing to even type it, but it took Vivian Gornick’s account of her encounters with strangers and acquaintances and friends to remind me, to help me realize a person could become a person just by walking around.
