“(…) nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human – the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques – was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off.”
The Odd Woman and the City by the American writer Vivian Gornick is a memoir consisting of series of colourful and evocative vignettes, each of them depicting the life lived alone in the megalopolis like New York City with all the shades of the urban existence, and the anthology of intimate reflections on solitude, ageing, friendship and romantic love, the value of meaningful conversation and companionship in one’s life to forge deep human connection and platonic relationships with those around us especially as we grow older. This collection portrays the life of an older woman living alone in the city whose identity is not defined by the narrow social norms or by romantic love and for whom life has not turned out as expected:
“I went to school, but the degree did not get me an office in midtown. I married an artist, but we lived on the Lower East Side. I began to write but nobody read me (…). For the door to the golden company did not open.”
These vignettes are based on Gornick’s notes and essays that she wrote between 1980s and 2010s which provide a window into the late 20th century New York City. There is no chronological or any particular order to these vignettes. The sequence resembles the city itself, multilayered and diverse. Gornick herself refers to this collection as a collage. Throughout her memoir the essential humanity is served through conversation and companionship where a small talk is deadening with the primary delight being the engagement of mind and romantic love often not contributing to one’s peace and stability.
The Odd Woman and the City is an ode to New York City which is not described merely as a place, but the personality on its own which plays a significant role in shaping the life of all the characters we meet in this collection of vignettes. As readers we observe the narrator’s chance encounters with strangers, conversations overheard on the bus or on the sidewalk. The Baudelaire idea of walking in the city, of being a flaneur is central to the narrator’s existence which refers to the urban exploration with no destination based on the observations of city’s daily scenes without any clear purpose. We are treated to the snapshots of lives from diverse backgrounds, with New York City being presented as a kaleidoscope of the variety and idiosyncrasies of human experience and where one is “in search of a self-reflected back in the eye of the stranger”.
“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.”
The vignettes are full of poignant and thought-provoking musings on reading and the importance of literature in shaping one’s identity and interests. Books here serve as a vessel to finding solace in the world that is constantly in rush. Gornick also presents the relationships of other writers of the past decades with the cities their inhabited. One of them being Samuel Johnson who in the 1740s “walked the streets of London to cure himself of chronic depression” with London being “the place that received his profound discomfort, his monumental unease. The street pulled him out of morose isolation, reunited him with humanity, (…) gave him back the warmth of his own intellect”. Another writer mentioned is Charles Reznikoff who in the 1940s walked the streets of his New York City. Even though he was not solitary, “the lucidity in his work comes from an inner silence so keen, so luminous, the reader cannot help feeling that he wandered because he needed some reminder of his own humanity”. Gornick also mentions the work of Walter Benjamin, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Dickens, Seymour Krim, Evelyn Scott. All these writers were attracted to the idea of being “a walker in the city”.
On the meaning of friendship, Gornick goes back to writings of the 3rd century roman writer, Caius as well as of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge and concludes that “nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another’s company”.
She further notes that friends are not always the ones who agree on everything or share the same opinions. Gornick depicts her friendship with a female writer referred to in the book by the name Alice who is twenty years her senior. Despite having had a so-called fulfilling life in terms of her marriage and literary career, Alice ended up in the assisted living facility where she was starved for the human connection through the conversation. Gornick used to visit her regularly to talk about books and culture even though they had a polar opposite view on politics and their meetings often ended up in arguments, but those disagreements did not prevent the connection between them. On the other hand, Gornick mentions her relationship with Manny with whom she shared the same political views, they read similar books and enjoyed the same things when it comes to art but they both failed to establish connection. Gornick concludes that “good conversation is not a matter of mutuality of interests or class concerns or commonly held ideals, it’s a matter of temperament: the thing that makes someone respond instinctively with an appreciative (…) rather than the argumentative (…). In the presence of shared temperament, conversation almost never loses its free, unguarded flow; in its absence, one is always walking on eggshells”.
On the importance of human connection, Gornick reminds us of the relationship between the writer Henry James and Constance Wilson who often went for a walk together in Florence or Venice and discussed books, literature, or visited the museums:
“(…) the intellectual honesty that animated their talk resulted in a conversation that made each of them feel less alone in the world.”
Gornick herself reveals that she was married twice and divorced twice and as she says: “each [marriage] was undertaken by a woman [she] did not know to a man [she] also didn’t know”. Her more mature relationship at the later stage of her life was based on the intimacy and desire rather than romantic love. Gornick later admits that lack of romantic love has become the source of pain and conflict for the rest of her life but at the same her basic need has always been the company of minds attuned to her own.
The title of the book was inspired by to the novel The Odd Woman by George Gissing which portrays the challenges faced by the unmarried women in the late 19th century London who were trying to lead a meaningful life despite the confinement of social norms. Gornick recognised herself in the Odd Women described by Gissing, especially in the character of Rhoda Nunn. It is in Rhoda that Gissing captured the anxieties and emotions that Gornick immediately recognised in her own life and that of other ‘odd’ women living in the late 20th century.
Gornick also refers to Mary Britton Miller born in 1883 who also became one of the Odd Women. In 1911 Mary settled in New York City where she worked and lived alone for the rest of her life until 1975. Self-educated, Mary’s centre of human connection were her friends rather than romantic relationships. Most of her work remained unnoticed until she published a few modernist novels under a pen name of Isabel Bolton when she was in her mid-60s. That work attracted the attention of literary circles. In all her novels, Mary depicts the life of a woman who is going through her day in New York City while reflecting and thinking about her place in the world and her inner life. The women in Mary’s novels are always older women between the age of 40 and 80 who are seemingly alone but with love for the city they inhabit where they were able to bury their loneliness. That loneliness or rather solitude brought anguish and solace at the same time.
Vivian Gornick’s friendship with the older man called Leonard is highlighted in the book and it frames all the vignettes. Leonard himself leads the life similar to the one lived by Vivian. He is “sophisticated about his own unhappiness”. They both exist alone but are far from being lonely. Their relationship with each other and with the world captures the essence of solitary life and solitude is shown as an integral part of one’s existence as opposed to loneliness.
“What we are in fact, is a pair of solitary travellers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give other border report.”
Both Leonard and Vivian have an acute perception of their own solitude and find solace in their regular weekly meetups when they go for a walk, cook a dinner together and have a meaningful conversation on “the unlived life”, ageing, books they have read, films they watched, and observations they made. These are their shared moments of connection which make their lives meaningful and hopeful.
“Why (…) did we not meet more often than once a week, (…) extend each other the comfort of the daily chat? (…) Whatever the circumstance, for each of us the glass is perpetually half-empty. Either he is registering loss, failure, defeat – or I am. (…) [I]t is the way life feels to each of us and the way life feels is inevitably the way life is lived.”
On growing older, Gornick notes that at some point the magic of tomorrow disappears and one must start living in the present moment:
“Turning sixty was like being told I had six months to live. Overnight, retreating into the refuge of a fantasised tomorrow became a thing of the past. Now there was only the immensity of the vacated present. (…) how exactly did one manage to occupy the present when for so many years one hadn’t? Days passed, then weeks and months in which I dreaded waking into my own troubled head. (…) I became alert not to the meaning but to the astonishment of human existence.”
The Odd Woman and the City captures the life lived deeply and thoughtfully, with all its challenges and idiosyncrasies veiled in the urban atmosphere of New York City. Gornick is such a sharp observer of human condition. Her writing is insightful, moving and relatable for those living in the cities and those loving literature. We experience the inner workings of Gornick’s mind and her essential humanity.
I highly recommend this book. If you liked Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, you will also enjoy The Odd Woman and the City.
