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At age 30,Vivian Gornick began writing what was termed "personal journalism" for the Village Voice, where she worked as a journalist for 15 years.Over the next 30-odd years, her numerous articles, essays, and book reviews appeared in publications including the Nation, the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, theWashington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the American Scholar, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her memoir, Fierce Attachments, first published in 1987, was reissued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005 as part of its series of modern classics. She has published two collections of essays, Approaching Eye Level in 1996 and The End of the Novel of Love, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, in 1997. In 2001 she published The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. Her most recent book is The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Vivian Gornick was born, raised, and educated in New York City. She received her BA from City College of New York and her MA from New York University. She has taught in several creative writing programs, including Pennsylvania State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Houston, Bennington Writing Seminars, and the University of Arizona, where she was a tenured professor. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the Ford Foundation.
This interview took place as we sat at Gornick's kitchen table in lower Manhattan. Once I was back home, however, so strong was my image of Gornick drawn from her books and critical essays that I saw her most clearly as she walked the streets of the city. Sometimes she was arguing with her mother, as she did in her fine memoir depicting their passionate relationship, as they made their way to a lecture or to find a pair of shoes; or she was engrossed in a conversation with a friend, trying to untangle a line of thought that had snagged on a potential inconsistency; or she was alone, gathering energy from the energy in the streets. Nothing escaped her attention. Back at her desk, she assumed her task-the task she demands of a writer-to think as critically as she could about what she'd seen and heard and experienced....