The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir by Vivian GornickFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

The Odd Woman and the City is a memoir in the form of a collection of vignettes, some of which are just a few sentences each, and others of which span several pages. Gornick writes about New York, about moving through the city alone or with friends, observing and overhearing, and she writes about books and writers, and she writes about herself, how she is and how she sees herself, and it’s all smart and interesting and satisfying. She writes about friendship, how she and her friend Leonard get along because “the self-image each of us projects to the other is the one we carry around in our heads: the one that makes us feel coherent” (5). She writes about identifying with Dickens, Johnson, and other “melancholy Brits,” about identifying with a vision of city-dwellers as “the eternal groundlings who wander these mean and marvelous streets in search of a self reflected back in the eye of the stranger” (9). She writes about moments of connection, about seeing a high school kid help an old woman in the grocery store, or about when she helped an older man on a treacherously icy day, or about watching street hawkers and their customers in upper Manhattan when she was in high school: “People who were strangers talking at one another, making one another laugh, cry out, crinkle up with pleasure, flash with anger […] people sparking witty, exuberant responses in one another, in themselves” (13). I love passages like this:

It’s the voices I can’t do without. In most cities of the world the populace is planted in centuries of cobblestoned alleys, ruined churches, architectural relics, none of which are ever dug up, only piled one on top of another. If you’ve grown up in New York, your life is an archaeology not of structures but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not really replacing one another: (173-174)

Also great is this piece about Joseph Chaikin, which appears in the book in slightly modified form. I love the descriptions of the differing moods of Westbeth/views from Westbeth, and the central part of Joe’s performance of Beckett in two voices, his post-stroke older voice and his recorded younger voice playing off one another—it makes me wish I could have been there.