Alone in New York
on Vivian Gornick's The Odd Woman and the City
I’m thrilled to be sharing my foreword for Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City with you. Before I get into it, I want to encourage you to buy it if you haven’t already direct from Daunt here! And let you know about this event I’m doing with Kat Lister at Daunt Marylebone to celebrate publication on Thursday 6 February!
The first time I read Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City I was desperate for fellowship. I wanted to read an account of a life lived alone, specifically the life of a woman older than me. I hoped that it would recast my own experience of living alone – largely without romantic love – and the potential for its ongoingness, as a desirable, even honourable way of life. I assumed I’d be able to enlist myself as one of the ‘Odd Women’ Gornick sees herself as.
But I've come to believe that if you read Gornick in search of such fellowship you will be reading her wrong. Early in the book Gornick says to her friend Leonard (a man ‘sophisticated about his own unhappiness’) ‘I’m not the right person for this life’ and this confusion and shock of being at odds with how she thought her life would turn out suffuses the text. Some years ago, as my contemporaries eagerly shared and wrote essays, books and poems about early motherhood, motherhood and madness, motherhood and creativity, marriage and divorce and the trials of heteronormative traditions, I was left wondering what there was for me – no partner, no kids, approaching middle age.
Where was the literature that would help me feel seen? Where could I find the intellectual engagement with my situation and my story, that might enliven it? I freighted The Odd Woman and the City with my concerns of loneliness and alienation, and because I so desperately wanted to find the canon of literature about women ‘like me’ I didn’t appreciate I’d inadvertently narrowed the scope of The Odd Woman and the City’s interests.
As someone who writes about how to make a life alone, a life where romantic love is not at the centre of my plan-making, I’ve occasionally worried I might make a reputation for myself as a patron saint of singledom. It occurs to me that despite myself I’ve made Gornick one. Take this passage:
As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy, and sentiment. It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones; so deeply embedded in the makeup of the spirit, it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence. It would be a cause of pain and conflict for the rest of my life. I prize my hardened heart – I have prized it all these years – but the loss of romantic love can still tear at it.
Romantic love tore at me too, and it still does. How profoundly to heart I took her words: it wasn’t just me!
