Vivian Gornick

VGVivian Gornick
SPSophie Poole

Vivian Gornick is an American memoirist, journalist, and essayist based in New York. A literary girl from the Bronx, Gornick's eyes were always trained on downtown Manhattan. In 1969, after leaving a PhD program at Berkeley in English literature, she started writing for The Village Voice. There, finally south of Fourteenth Street, Gornick wrote polemical, feminist articles for the alternative newspaper and found her point of view as a memoirist. After the Voice, she wrote memoirs and essay collections, most notably Fierce Attachments, which centers on her mother and the Bronx of her childhood. It has been called the best memoir in the last fifty years. The Odd Woman and the City continues her excavation of her relationships to her friends, family, men, her work, literature, and New York.

In our age of the personal narrative, she is the standard par excellence. Gornick also regularly writes for The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books, among others, where she often employs her life as a method for understanding literature and vice versa. In her 1997 essay “The End of the Novel of Love,” which epitomizes this technique, she writes, “We are cast adrift, radically ‘alone’ now, in literature as in life, groping in the books we write to find the metaphoric elements that will achieve new power.” Below, we speak about this radical loneliness as it pervades literature, but also as a surprising aftereffect that she and and many second-wave feminists experienced. This loneliness makes her language and insight particularly brilliant and harsh. Reading Gornick is not unlike looking directly at the sun; its clarity is a source of pleasure and a little pain. This interview took place across May and June 2024.

VGVivian Gornick
SPSophie Poole

In your writing, you often revisit apocryphal scenes or moments in your life, but you have rarely touched on your time at City College. Why are you writing about it now?

I had a conversation with an editor a year and a half ago. Out of nowhere, she said she’d like to have a book on City College and I had nothing to do. So I said, “City College, why?” I couldn’t understand why she, a young woman from the Midwest, would be interested in City College, but it turns out City has a long romantic personality in the culture at large. I said to her, “Mine was the generation of the last of the golden age.” I graduated in late 1957. After this was put into my head, I started thinking about what that school had meant. Essentially, we were all the children of working-class immigrants, mostly Jewish families. In the years that I was there, you would’ve thought that all these people would be gung-ho about preparing for a profession for the future. But the fact of the matter is it wasn’t. I never once heard a word about money. I never once heard a word about professional expectations. We weren’t brilliant, the teachers weren’t brilliant, nobody was brilliant, but it was absolutely imbued with the sense of the life of the mind. That atmosphere was powerful and it created the school as I remembered it.

Now, I have to add that, as it turned out, I found myself having a very hard time writing this book. I have, in fact, given it up. I couldn’t structure it. I couldn’t find a way to write about an institution. What I ended up with though is about a 25-page essay, all anecdotal memoir, and it’s good. I think it will be published separately. What I suggested to the editor with whom I contracted and my agent was that I take that essay and make it a lead piece and produce a collection of essays which will be called City College Remembered and Other Essays. That’s what I’m doing.

When you were beginning to think about your memories at City, is there one moment that stood out?

During a summer session of English lit, the room was packed and everybody looked like me. Our clothing was absurd, came from chain stores. Our shoes were scuffed. We were hardly a fashion place. So, there we are, this room full of kids who looked like me, but in the back was a boy who was very handsome and looked nothing like us. He was slim and good looking. His hair was a work of art. Perfect, beautiful haircut. I’ll never forget that. He was wearing a navy blue sweater made of thin wool. I thought he was French. The girl in front of me turned around and whispered to us, “He’s from Bard.” The girl on my left said, “Where’s that?” And the girl on my right said, “What’s that?” [Laughs.] But when the teacher asked why Isabel Archer went back to Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, everyone in the class called out, á la Henry James, “Because it was morally the right thing to do.” But the girl on my right called out, “She’s afraid of herself.” I say, that was City College to a tee. Unworldliness matched with lived experience, trumped by lived experience.

Isabel Archer is a character you visit and think about often.

When I was a girl, Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Collette’s narrators—these three were our magical symbolic figures. All the literary girls were crazy for it. These were the women who were actually teaching us who we were going to be, or so we thought. It took me 30 years to figure out who Isabel really was, to really feel penetrated by that view, and to realize that’s exactly what she was: “Afraid of herself.”

When I first met you, you handed me your book Unfinished Business, which deals with rereading and the idea of repetition. How do you use repetition as a method to make meaning?

Well, it takes forever to understand anything. And rereading is vital. The older you get, the more you reread to see how much more you really understand of what you have been reading.

Within your work, there are certain anecdotes that are repeated and then understood in different ways. What is that impulse to return to a story or conversation or an incident on the street?

I think it’s a lack of imagination on my part. [Laughs.] No, I am a writer who is accused all the time of repeating herself.

There’s your anxiety about that, but I feel like it’s an advantage.

How many thoughts can you have? If you said it really well once, it’s a great temptation to use it again. [Laughs.]

The biography you wrote of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Solitude and the Self: Thinking with Elizabeth Cady Stanton takes its title from Stanton’s speech with the same name. In this speech, Stanton takes the universal experience of solitude and transforms it into a politically animating force. You often come back to themes of loneliness and solitude in your work. How do you consider these themes through your personal experience but also as a potentially politically vital experience?

For our generation of feminists, the second wave, never before really in our history and in Western life, have so many people come to live alone. Thousands like me, who would have stayed married, have not stayed married. In New York City, I think 50% of the households are single-person households. It’s been a big shock to many people that the choices we made, because of our enlightened stand on women’s rights and what it meant to try to become an independent, experiencing human being, that what came with that was loneliness. When I first got divorced, for two solid years, I enjoyed my solitude immensely. It was such a pleasure to not have to take another human being into consideration every minute of the day and night. Then solitude, which was a pleasure, turns to loneliness, which was a punishment.

You make a distinction between solitude and loneliness.

Solitude is not only the human condition, which is what Elizabeth Stanton discovered when she suddenly experienced this extraordinary sense of loneliness. So much of her life was the movement with other women, and suddenly she was ostracized. She didn’t even realize how much she had felt at one with a large body of people. Now, she was married and had seven children, but she was alone spiritually. But it deepened her philosophically. That’s why she’s a great figure to me.

You mention Stanton’s feeling of ostracization in her wave of her feminism and how she watched it die. What was your experience being a part of the second wave and then observing it die down?

I am one of those feminists who concentrates on what we did accomplish rather than what we didn’t. I know everyone feels the feminist movement failed to achieve itself, especially since Me Too. Young women like you, rightfully, were so angry because it was too little, too late. Since 2017, most young women’s rage is an accusation that we didn't accomplish the revolution. From your perspective, yes, the world seems still full of sexual harassment in the workplace. That came as a terrible shock to me. After all, sexual harassment was on the books for 50 years. Nevertheless, for somebody like me, the difference between women’s lives now and women’s lives when I was a girl is incalculable. You do thousands of different kinds of jobs we never dreamed of doing. Truly, when I was a girl, if we did not get married and have children, we were seen as unnatural. The odd one, an oddity. You’ve never experienced that. You grew up in a world in which it was assumed that you would have work, that marriage was secondary, that you were not going to define yourself with marriage. Even though there are millions of women who still do define themselves with marriage, that is true, a significant number do not. You are living in a world open to immensely greater choices of how to construct a life than we ever did.

For me, the second wave produced a sufficient amount of social change. I see the meaning of a social revolution. It’s slow, slow, slow. One by one by one by one. People have changed since 2017, since Me Too opened its mouth and started screaming. What Me Too revealed was the degree to which men and women still see each other instrumentally, transactionally. Oh, she’s not a human being. She’s somebody who just has something I want, usually sex. But also: He’s not a human being. He’s got power. He’s got what I want. You want a world in which people see each other as mutual human beings, fellow creatures. And that we don’t have yet.

I know you’ve expressed regret for some of your early polemical writing, but that, at the same time, this style gave you your point-of-view. In your essay “The Second Sex at Fifty,” you wrote that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was a polemical work that became literature. How can polemical writing become literature and why do you think The Second Sex was an example of polemical writing that became a great book?

Because it was deep. Polemical writing is usually composed of surface descriptions. The Second Sex went deep. When you read The Second Sex, you didn’t just get angry, you thought. She made you think deeply about the condition. It is textured depth that makes literature, always. Polemical writing is usually surface declaration.

Are there feminist writers today that you follow?

Nobody comes to mind. I’m very bad when I’m asked those questions. You name some.

Moira Donegan. Rebecca Traister.

I did read Traister in 2017 when she started, yes. A number of my friends and I started to read her.

What was your reaction when you learned Roe v. Wade had been overturned?

The day after Roe v. Wade was overturned, 60 grassroots organizations sprang up to announce, essentially, “We’re not going back.” I knew that was going to happen. I have always thought abortion was a primitive issue and that it would never be ours in my lifetime.

I don’t know why this always makes me cry. It’s nothing. It’s the hormones for me. I cry easily these days.

That’s okay. I cry all the time.

I always knew it was a primitive issue and we would fight for it again and again and again. So I don’t feel as stricken about the overturning. It was horrifying, and yet, at the same time, I knew that what happened was going to happen again. That millions of women will never go back to accepting being trapped by that into motherhood and marriage.

The social norm is so out of sync with the legal realities. It’s very emotional. Even though I’m affected by this ruling, I live in a state where I could still access abortion. I read a ProPublica piece following a woman in Tennessee for the year after she was denied an abortion. The horrors of that reality feel distant from my life, which creates a dissonant feeling to the law.

We live in different worlds. And the laws that prohibit you and me from getting what we want never really applied to us. I mean, I had an abortion when I was 20. It was hard to find, but there was no question I was going to find it and get it. And people were going to leave me alone and help me, legal or illegal. Whereas if you live in a state like Texas or Montana, you are fucked.

In your first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud, I was shocked by your prose.

It’s over the top. Gushes all over the place.

How did you begin to find the through line in your work?

Finding the through line was part of the task of making myself a writer. Discovering the meaning of a through line and realizing something had to go somewhere and be about something. That book wasn’t. It was like writing a diary. I’m amazed it did as well as it did. It was nominated for the National Book Award. It is descriptive, right?

Every room you walk into the furniture is described—the type of wood, the plush carpets. You describe people’s faces and how they carry themselves. Its density feels more like a novel. You’ve mentioned how you could never write fiction. But when you sat down and attempted, were the situations drawn from your life?

With Fierce Attachments, for years, I would tell those stories about my mother and Nettie, the woman who lived next door, and everyone always said to me, “Oh, that’s a novel.” But I tried to write it as a fictional story. I couldn’t bring it to life. It just laid there like a dead dog. I couldn’t get anybody in the room or out of the room.

Why do you think that is?

I think about it whenever I’m reading, especially when I’m reading fiction. I think, God, look how this is done. I can only do this when I’m actually using myself as the instrument of illumination. Somehow when I am what would I call the ‘unsurrogated self,’ when I am clearly a narrator, then my storytelling gifts come to life. It’s my psyche. It is genuinely my belief that every writer has only one genre in which they can excel. I’ve seen it again and again and again, where a novelist writes a lousy memoir or a lousy essay. The opposite certainly is true, where essayists write mediocre novels.I mean, every now and then there is somebody who can do a lot of different things, but it’s very rare.

What are your reasons for praising Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook as being one of the major works by a woman writer in the twentieth-century?

It was the 1950s and nobody was doing what she was doing. The genius lay with putting a woman at the center of a serious novel. She wanted to present a picture of the contemporary post-war world. Men all over the place were writing post-war novels. But she was the first to do that and to be doing that well. When The Golden Notebook was published in America, Irving Howe wrote a front-page review for the Book Review of the The New York Times at a time when the Book Review mattered, and declared it an important novel. You could feel in his review that he himself couldn’t believe he was writing that review.

Is there a successor to Lessing in contemporary fiction?

I don’t feel that I have the right to critique contemporary novels since I don’t really deeply understand the references.

What do you find yourself wanting to critically engage with?

Books written 40 years ago. [Laughs.] If there was one contemporary writer whom I think I understood, it would be Rachel Cusk. But I don’t respond to her. All of them, including Catherine Lacey or Rachel Kushner or whomever, are all living in a world of emotional disconnect. I can feel it, but I don’t respond to it.

I see your work as an attempt to wrest yourself away from detachment, by walking around New York or however else, and trying to engage, converse, and connect. This is at odds with this modern affectation in contemporary literature of, I’m absent, I’m detached, I’m alienated from life.

This goes back to Joan Didion. She was doing it in a time when that already felt old to me, like its moment had passed. But of course it wasn’t true. That feeling of living in a world that is utterly fractured is true. It’s what they call ‘post-modern.’ Modernism was the first shot out of the box with the astonishing feeling of being alienated in the world, that the world itself was never going to be a source of comfort or solace. Why am I alive and why is this world going on?

Modernism was enough. I don’t feel the writers of today produce a new sense of those feelings. But I’m old and they’re having their moment.

Both Odd Woman and Fierce Attachments are centered around conversations, a dialogue between yourself and another person or a group of people—your mother, a close friend, a stranger on the street, your book group. And you often speak about how the expression of the life of the mind is conversation, especially the conversations you have with friends. What was the last really good or awful conversation you had?

I had a really good conversation last night. I had dinner with five people. The host was a retired academic, a historian. His wife is a musician, a flutist. The other couple were also into music and another friend was a psychoanalyst. We fell into a long conversation about tenure. I took the position that it should be ended. The conversation was rich and extensive. Any conversation that deepens in the course of an hour is satisfying. It has to, just like a book, go somewhere. Or you have to feel that you do. When that happens, that gives me my greatest pleasure. That’s what does it for me. There are so many different kinds of friendships, so many people we call our friends, don’t we? There are people that you’re friends with because you went through a snow storm together. Montaigne made a distinction between the essential and the contingent. All the friends who are your friends circumstantially as opposed to the essential, in which supposedly it’s two sensibilities that meet and enrich each other. I like to think about that.

In an essay in Approaching Eye Level, you write about an older woman who became a type of mentor to you. Do you think of mentorship as a type of friendship?

It’s a type of friendship in which the deepest part of one human being is being cultivated by both of them. But there’s no equality in mentorship.

Were there writers you looked up to when you were young?

Now that you put that question to me, no. I didn’t really have mentors and I think that’s a lack in me. It’s a way to understand the direction in which you are trying to grow. You know, I have to tell you that I think I have an odd personality.

How do you mean that?

I have done very little of what is called ‘reaching out’ in my life. Not because I knew who I was and was haughty about it. I think it’s a personality defect that a great deal of my life I felt myself stumbling along alone, not able to figure out who I was or what I was doing. When I started to write, I didn’t really know what to do with that. I had a very long apprenticeship, whereas other writers could develop faster. Knew how to search out people who could further them intellectually and culturally. People knew how to connect themselves to the larger world for the sake of worldly advancement. I never knew any of that, and in fact, if I hadn’t lived as long as I have lived, I don’t think I would have any kind of reputation or recognition.

I still don’t understand why I have so many young readers. What is it you see in my work that turns you on?

By putting yourself into the narrative, I think you prefigured a writing style that's now second nature for contemporary writers.

It is certainly the era of the first-person narrator. Even the ones who are good at writing fiction, they are all writing first person. To me, it reads like memoir. I don’t care how much they make up. The sound of that voice is a first-person narrator. I always know it’s the writer, not a fictional creation.

I feel a slight discomfort when reading a novel with a first-person narrator that's so deeply entwined with the author herself. There’s a bravery or brazenness to writing a memoir and saying, “This is me. It’s exactly me.”

This is a conundrum. The fact of the matter is the novel was the prize and the celebrated form of high literary culture forever. It’s really not anymore and nobody can actually face up to that. So they keep calling essentially non-fiction, fiction. I’ve known a number of novelists and I read their novels and I’m sure I’m reading a memoir. Then they say, “No, this didn’t happen. That’s why they call it fiction.” They’re using all the wrong cues to defend themselves against the charge that they’re not writing fiction.

For example, you don’t use people’s names.

No. I also compose. I put incidents together. I don’t feel obliged to be literal. Nevertheless, it’s a memoir. It’s me.

It’s like the novel is a nostalgic idea of the pinnacle of literature, which people continue to strive towards, but then also there’s a sense of hiding behind that structure.

It’s a time of profound lack of originality. Culturally speaking. You have to be a brave soul to make your way through this world and this life. [Laughs.]

Why did you stop working as a journalist?

I suddenly came to a moment where I said, “I am a stranger here in other people’s lives, I’ve had enough, I want to write out of my own life, not out of other people’s lives.”

For the London Review of Books, you recently wrote an essay reviewing an oral history of the Voice. The title for that piece is “Orgasm isn’t my bag,” referencing a comment you recalled making to Jill Johnston. Although you state your feminist concerns at the time were about work rather than sexual freedom, later in your life you did write about sex and desire.

Oh, really? A lot?

It’s definitely there.

Well, not making sex your subject doesn't mean that you don't like to fuck. [Laughs.]

Why did it not become your subject?

I was always sensual but never a sensualist. There are many millions of people who worship at the altar of sex, sexual love, sexual life, sexual independence, sexual pleasure, sexual self-realization. There are thousands of men who've made it their life's work. Look at Philip Roth or Norman Mailer, who made it the sine qua non of their protagonists to experience themselves sexually as central to their lives. In the women's movement, that became a big thing. There were many for whom experiencing sexual pleasure and independence—always having it, feeling free, not punished, not deprived—was a big thing. For me, it wasn't. First of all, sex was never problematic for me. Enough men found me sexy. I wasn't beautiful. I never thought I was.

Why did you never think that?

My mother was terrible. She always made me feel plain. People used to praise my eyes. She’d roll her own eyes and say, “Thank God for the eyes.” I always felt like they were stuck onto me. Anyway, it did not become my thing. There were many others for whom it did become crucial and they made a career as journalists out of that. If you were serious, you were all getting at the same thing: independence for women. I mean, that's why when Jill came to me and said, “I want you to know I have a vaginal as well as clitoral orgasm,” I said, “Orgasm's not my bag.” I was very surprised when they made it the headline because I wondered whether or not I should put it in. I thought, Have they got the same sense of humor? Will they see that it's funny? But they did.

You began writing for the Voice at the end of the '60s. But you’ve spoken about how it was a slow start. Can you give me the broad contours of your time there?

My decade was the 1970s. I wrote that first piece in 1968. And then the guy who ran the Voice, Dan Wolf, called me up and said, “Who the hell are you?”

What was Wolf’s reputation?

Everybody loved the man who was putting out this alternate newspaper. The best thing was the editorial policy was inviting amateurs. You got an opinion? Send it to us. We like it, we'll publish it.

Before writing for the Voice, had you been reading it?

I knew it and somebody had recommended that I read a piece. I was prepared to write for the Voice, but I was never really of it. Most of the people who were writing on the arts were immensely identified with the paper. I never was. I didn't feel part of it. The thing about the Voice was, and the thing about the time, the counterculture, like any culture, had a personality, but that personality was made up of different parts and you could identify with one part, not the whole. I didn't identify with the art scene at all. Rock music, downtown performance art, it wasn't me and it still isn't. When women's liberation came along, I got into it instantly. That was who I was.

Where were the offices?

A tiny rectangular building on the corner of Christopher and Sheridan Square. The offices were just like a rabbit warren, tiny, tiny offices. But most of us didn't work there. We got our assignments, we had an editorial conversation, and went home, and wrote. You went home into your poverty and your obscurity and your isolation and you wrote the goddamn thing.

Where were you living at the time?

I was living in a basement apartment on Charles Street. Right below where I am now. The building was a brownstone that was cut up into tiny apartments. Our apartment doors were flimsy, thin wooden doors that had been there for generations. One night, I came home and every apartment on the ground floor, including mine, had been burglarized. Doors punched in. They went through like locusts that day on Charles Street. They burgled fast and at a time when everybody was at work, in the middle of the morning. I had a very clunky manual typewriter. It was too heavy for them to take. Then I had a guy out on the sidewalk whispering obscenities into my window. The apartment was on the ground floor, at street level, and there was a gate on the windows. Nobody could get in. But one night in summer, I had the shade somewhat raised. Some guy squatted down at the window and he started to whisper what he would do to me if I let him in. I was terrified. Those things happened all the time. The rent was 86 dollars.

How much were you getting paid for each piece at the Voice?

Thirty dollars a piece. And sometimes you had to write for nothing. You know, I don't know how the hell I stayed alive.

You had to write at least three articles to make rent.

But I didn't do that. I got married and went away with my husband. Dan Wolf said, “Write for us,” but he meant freelance. I needed some security. Besides, I was a very dilatory writer. I wasn't a professional writer, I was a neurotic young woman. That's what he said to me. “You are a neurotic Jewish girl. You only produce one piece a year. How can I give you a job?” So I went away and got married again.

How did you meet?

I had an adjunct job teaching English at Stony Brook. He was an over-age graduate student who’d been going for the PhD for about 18 years.

Why did you move away from New York?

Well, he was an experimental psychologist studying ants. The ants he was studying were in great abundance in New Mexico. The ants were fantastic. They built ant hills that were like pyramids, and he could slice it down the middle and show you the cemetery, the storeroom. Kids from 20 miles around heard about him and came to the door and said, “Does the ant man live here?” and followed us out onto the desert.

That year, everybody in America was running away from home to join a commune, to make a new life. There were a couple of great communes where we were living. New Mexico was a very romantically envisioned landscape. The mazes were marvelous. Mountains purple and white in the distance, and the desert was glorious. But you know, it was so not where I belonged. Years later, I went back and I could hardly believe I'd been that woman.

How long were you there for?

A year.

So you weren't living on a commune, but you would visit them?

I discovered them and then I wrote to the Voice and suggested that I write about it. I left the husband repeatedly and I would go live on the commune. Four of them for about a week each until I got the feel for what that world was like. And then I wrote a long piece. They called it “Mecca on the Mesa.” I wrote, of course, like everybody would in those years. Not critically, adoringly. Then at the end of the year I left. I never should have married. I never wanted to be married. And I didn't know this. So I married twice. Each time lasted a couple of years.

How old were you each time?

The first time, 25. The second, 32.

So you left your marriage and New Mexico after a year.

I went to my friend, Claire, in Berkeley. I didn't know what to do with myself. So I wandered around, and then I met this Egyptian man. He was a Fulbright in engineering.

You met him soon after your marriage ended?

Immediately. The sex with my husband was not good. The sex with him was...Did you ever read Middlemarch?

Yeah.

Well, you know Dorothea idolizes Casaubon, right?

The 'genius'…

…who is stiff and dry and old and completely without any sensual being at all. But she worships his mind. Well, that's what I was like. A lot of us are like that. We worshiped Dorothea, we worshiped Isabel Archer. We worshiped all the girls who were high-minded and incredibly stupid, who had no sensual self to consult to tell us what was right and what was wrong. But even the girls who were all sensuality, that was all fuck-up also, right? To fall in love through sex and imagine that that is great love, lasting love? So, it was all bad.

It’s logical that as a young woman, without a sense of self, you’d fall for someone who you think is really brilliant because you want to be brilliant yourself.

Yes, absolutely. Before women's liberation, there was no way for any young woman, smart or stupid, to imagine gaining original power for herself. Everyone imagined it through the husband. The whole thing in life was to marry up. Depending on what you thought was 'up.' There were a lot of people for whom 'up' meant social standing, money, or political power. Very often, a mother, who was herself in a miserable marriage, didn't hesitate to instruct her daughter to make practically the same kind of match. Being miserable didn't signify. It was the territory. My mother didn't talk like that. My mother said, “Love is the most important thing in a woman's life.” But her idea of love was so abstract to me and I was constantly saying, “Ma, how will I know if I'm really, really, really in love? Right now I'm just hot. Right now I just want this man to kiss me and touch me.” But that was a no. What she really meant was to be respected and revered and adored. Most women wanted to be adored. I never did.

What did you want?

If I wanted anything, I wanted to do the adoring. But I was all fucked up. I got turned on by the serious man. But the fact of the matter is, I didn't really want to be married or be a mother. And I didn't know it.

When did you realize this?

In my late 30s and early 40s, I fell in love with a man who was much older than myself. I was with him for many years. He was married to somebody else and that was essentially okay. If he had not been married, we would not have lasted more than six months. I didn't have him on my neck. He was helplessly overbearing, but he didn't have a vested interest in it. He wasn't a pig. He didn't want to dominate women and children. He just didn't know any other way to be. He was an overbearing Italian. He had a wife whom everybody thought was very feisty because she was always fighting with him. I didn't want to be feisty.

At the very end of my 30s, I wanted a child. And I persuaded him that we should make a baby. I persuaded him to imagine us living both personally and politically. And that was very romantic to him, and to me, too. But together we couldn't do it. I didn't get pregnant. Then after that, I turned 40 and I gave it up. Of course, I've often wondered what my life would've been like if I had had a child. Since it took me forever to bring my writing life under control to begin with, I probably would’ve stopped writing and it would've been a whole different life.

After leaving New Mexico and your husband, you eventually did return to New York.

That's when I went to Dan Wolf at the Voice and I said, “I'll do whatever you ask.” He said, “So freelance for us for a while, and we'll see.” Then Jack Kerouac died and they asked me to go to the funeral and cover it. The funeral was in Lowell, Mass., where he lived. I froze. I thought, How do you get on a plane? How do you get there? How do you do this? You know, I didn't know how to be a reporter, but I did. I got on the plane, I had the address, I got in a taxi, I got there, and it was at a church. I was early, before people started pouring into the service. There was one guy in the church, and I took one look at him and my instinct told me he was a cops and robbers reporter from The Boston Globe. I walked over to him and he told me who he was, and I said, “Listen, I'm a real novice at this. I'm working for The Village Voice. I don't know what I'm doing.” He looked at me and said, “I'll tell you what, you know the writers, don't you? You show me who the writers are and I'll show you how to do this.” And he did. He took me under his wing, got me to the cemetery, and then back to the house. I told him who all the writers were there. Then I went home and I read for the first time Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and I wrote a really eloquent obituary, essentially an essay that covered the funeral. On the one hand, he was very important at that time. On the other hand, the intellectuals and the cultural elite all sneered at him. In all my ignorance, I did what the intellectual elite did. But then I went home and read the book, and it was a knockout. He never did anything like it again. But it captured the adolescence of American culture brilliantly. So I put all that into my piece.

You challenged the dominant intellectual idea.

Which is what Village Voice writers did. That was the kind of thing I did and could do.

Did it seem like your individual articles for the Voice pieces were building up towards a book or did the book feel like a separate part of your writing?

I think I moved from piece to piece to piece. Then I got so much attention. Everyone in the world was reading The Village Voice. From Columbia professors to disaffected housewives to crazies in the Village. Then an agent contacted me and wanted to be my agent. And then publishers. It was a world in which every year or so another person would distinguish him or herself and it would seem like a new, breakthrough voice.

Suddenly you were breaking through.

Suddenly I was the flavor of the year. It was the early ’70s. Whatever I wrote, somebody would contact me and suggest I write a book about that. I said no to everything. By this time I'd had the affair with the Egyptian man and I was very mesmerized by the thought of going to Egypt. I was so moved by the letters from his mother. She was so intelligent. Then an agent contacted me and said there was a proposition that I go to the Middle East and not write about the Israelis, because nobody was writing about the Arabs. I came back, quick as a whip, and said, “Send me to Egypt and I'll do that.” I got in touch with the Egyptian man I was with in Berkeley and he sent me to his mother and that was it. I left New York with ten names. I was 35 years old.

I wrote the book and then I needed a job again. I really wanted my job back at the Voice, but he wouldn’t give it to me. He was angry that I’d done this. Then they sold the paper to Clay Felker and Felker took me back, just for another couple of years. Then I’d had it. That’s when I started teaching. I was really tired of being a Village Voice person. I’d grown up out of it. I was there too long because I was afraid to leave. Other people were there who went out to have more illustrious careers because they left earlier. Jane Cramer. She was a very successful journalist at The New Yorker for many years and she was at the Voice. She knew how to write her way from the Voice to The New Yorker. I did not.

What does it feel like to be writing for these uptown establishments, legacy publications, later in your career after being a fixture of the downtown literary scene for so long?

Well, the uptown world isn’t what it was when I was young. Nothing is. But it feels better. It feels good.

Back then, what was your proximity to these uptown publications?

I was not in relation to them. They were midtown and I was downtown. We all knew that they looked down on us as raffish, bohemian, not elegant, not legitimate, not really educated. Not the elite midtown intellectuality of The New York Review of Books. That was my model. The New Yorker, I can’t remember now, but I guess it’s the way I’ve always felt about The New Yorker. In a way you want publication in The New Yorker because everybody wanted it—uptown, downtown—because it was the most glamorous middlebrow publication. You’d have the widest readership imaginable. At the same time, you could write very intelligently in it. But, essentially, it meant middlebrow success. The New York Review, on the other hand, was intellectual midtown success. The thing about the Voice, which is both good and bad, was the incredible immediacy. That is its own power. At the same time, that's a very limited power. That immediacy did not gain respect. It did not carry the authority of pieces that were weighty, researched and very well written. We remained the children. A perpetual adolescent in the minds of the culture.

When did you feel like you matured from this perpetual adolescent in the culture? When you left The Voice and then published Fierce Attachments?

Yeah, that’s when I began to feel grown up.

How old were you when you wrote Fierce Attachments?

Almost 50.

For Lux, you wrote an essay about your relationship with your psychoanalyst. At one point, you told your psychoanalyst, I’m never going to be “one half of a happy couple who meets up with two other happy couples on Friday nights for dinner somewhere on the Upper West Side.”

I thought the analyst’s idea of a successful analysis for me was to get me married and settled in a middle-class marriage on the Upper West Side. I said to her, “That is never going to happen.” It represented a moment of clarification on my part. In a way, it was a turning point in that she grasped the meaning of what I was saying. She never wanted to sacrifice me to theory. When she saw the way things really were with me, she turned on a dime.

People go into analysis because they’re in pain. If you’re not in pain, there’s no reason to even think about it. But if you are in pain, very often those pains originate in places we can’t reach consciously. The analyst is in a position to help lift you from those places and give you some understanding of your own behavior. Most behaviors have unconscious origins. We don’t know why we do what we do. We don’t know why we feel unreasonably but strongly on so many things. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, but you don’t want to do it, you promise yourself you won’t do it and you can’t stop, that clearly has some sort of mental origin you can’t get at. That’s a case for wanting to explore psychotherapy.

I appreciated the essay because you wrote about how classic psychoanalytic theory is, for example, trying to persuade a woman who is professionally successful to be more in touch with her ‘femininity,’ which is to have a partner and a home. I liked how you deconstructed that and how you both were able to transcend this retrograde theory.

We were both living in a world that was in transition. She changed as much as I did. You would never encounter this today. If you found a therapist, no therapist would ever approach you like, “Look, let’s face it, what you really want is to be married and have children.” “You are just being competitive with men.” We changed all that for you.

How do you feel about New York at this time in your life?

Since the pandemic, the city feels horribly changed. It hurts my heart horribly to see the city half dead. These are one of the few times I wish I was significantly younger so that I could look forward to it changing again. For instance, in the 1970s, New York was horrifying. There was a famous headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” And it was my great pleasure to see it come out of it. I have never stopped using the city all the time exactly the same. Through the pandemic, through this and that. I never stopped using the subway, I never stopped walking the streets, I never stopped seeing people. I go through it. I developed a phrase called “approaching eye level.”

Right, that's the title of one of your collections.

I developed that from the way I walk in New York. New York is not a city that’s ever written about or thought about or experienced in terms of its architecture. People are not looking, like in Europe, at the streets and the buildings. In New York it’s the knifing through the anonymous crowd. For me it’s been the same no matter what. I experience the crowd.