Vivian Gornick and a Life of One’s Own

“Giving up on love has been the work of a lifetime for Gornick,” writes Laura Marsh in a review of reporter, author and feminist Vivian Gornick’s new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City. In the first-ever installment of her Rumpus series “Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me,” Sari Botton interviewed Gornick on how to write vivid, honest nonfiction about the people she has loved, including ex-husbands and lovers. In The Odd Woman and the City, Marsh proposes, Gornick turns away from self-definition through romance and towards “constructing a life that doesn’t serve love, whether through hope or regret, indulgence or renunciation.”