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  • Interview with Vivian Gornick
  • Stephanie S. Farber (bio) and Vivian Gornick

At age 30, Vivian Gornick began writing what was termed “personal journalism” for the Village Voice, where she worked as a journalist for 15 years. Over the next 30-odd years, her numerous articles, essays, and book reviews appeared in publications including the Nation, the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the American Scholar, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her memoir, Fierce Attachments, first published in 1987, was reissued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005 as part of its series of modern classics. She has published two collections of essays, Approaching Eye Level in 1996 and The End of the Novel of Love, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, in 1997. In 2001 she published The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Her most recent book is The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Vivian Gornick was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She received her BA from City College of New York and her MA from New York University. She has taught in several creative writing programs, including Pennsylvania State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Houston, Bennington Writing Seminars, and the University of Arizona, where she was a tenured professor. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the Ford Foundation.

This interview took place as we sat at Gornick’s kitchen table in lower Manhattan. Once I was back home, however, so strong was my image of Gornick drawn from her books and critical essays that I saw her most clearly as she walked the streets of the city. Sometimes she was arguing with her mother, as she did in her fine memoir depicting their passionate relationship, as they made their way to a lecture or to find a pair of shoes; or she was engrossed in a conversation with a friend, trying to untangle a line of thought that had snagged on a potential inconsistency; or she was alone, gathering energy from the energy in the streets. Nothing escaped her [End Page 133] attention. Back at her desk, she assumed her task—the task she demands of a writer—to think as critically as she could about what she’d seen and heard and experienced. She used herself as the instrument of clarification. She dug deeply to make sense of it all for her readers.

Certain themes and preoccupations recur frequently in Gornick’s writing: urban life, loneliness, feminism, work. “To live consciously is the real business of our lives,” Vivian Gornick has written, and she is an exemplar of how that’s done today, looking at issues head on and refusing to flinch from what she sees. She reports back to us with frankness, candor, eloquence, and passion.

Vivian Gornick was interviewed for Fourth Genre in February 2005.

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Farber: Let’s start by talking about your latest book, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Is it a biography?

Gornick: The book is called a biographical essay. It’s framed in a personal essay, and the “I” who is narrating this essay is Vivian Gornick, a representative of the 1970s generation of feminists. In 1970, someone put Stanton’s last public speech, “The Solitude of Self,” into my hands. When I read it I thought, “We’re starting where she left off.” The speech is deep and profound and brilliant, existential in its understanding. It speaks of how every human being is alone in life. Stanton has come to understand the profound solitariness of every human life, and, therefore, what a terrible thing it is to deny a woman all the political power she can have, since she is hobbled by this solitariness from the very beginning. Stanton never forgets who she is and why she’s talking. She never forgets she’s speaking on behalf of feminists, of women’s rights. I start the book with her delivering this thoughtful, passionate final speech, as she steps down from the leadership of the suffrage movement in 1892. I ponder its meaning and describe what...

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