The Odd Woman and the City

(Paperback)

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Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.

Set in New York, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance meetings, and ever-changing relationships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city that has done the same.

Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's animated exchange of more than twenty years with her best friend Leonard, as well as interactions with grocers, doormen, people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful.

A narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, in this memoir we encounter Gornick's rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.


'A slim book with big echoes . . . She is as good a writer about friendship as we have.' New York Times
'An elusive and stirring memoir.' Los Angeles Times
'A series of sharply observed vignettes.'New Yorker
'Typically lucid . . . startling.' Guardian

Author Bio

Vivian Gornick is the author of numerous books, including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, named the best memoir of the past 50 years by the New York Times Book Review in 2019; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications.