18 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
At eighty-four, Gornick says she is surprised by the writer she turned out to be.
LIFEAND LETTERS
LOOK AGAIN
Vivian Gornick revisits the books she’s read—and the lives she’s lived.
BY ALEXANDRASCHWARTZ
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIGITTE LACOMBE
I
n her memoir “Fierce Attachments,”
Vivian Gornick describes the forma-
tive afternoons that she spent with Net-
tie, a neighbor in the Bronx apartment
building where she grew up. In a build-
ing full of street-smart Jews, Nettie, a
beautiful Ukrainian widow with a young
son and a dreamy, childlike manner, was
one of the lone Gentiles. She was a lace-
maker, and, after school, Vivian would
sit at Nettie’s kitchen table, watching
her work the fabric and listening to her
spin fantasies about money and love.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I’m com-
ing off the trolley car and I slip and
sprain my ankle and they take me to
the hospital and the doctor who comes
to help me is tall and so handsome, and
kind and gentle, and he looks into my
face and I look into his, and we can’t
tear our eyes away from each other,”
Nettie would say, and keep on saying.
Then came young Vivian’s turn:
And I would say, “Wouldn’t it be wonder-
ful if there was a flood or an epidemic or a rev-
olution, and even though I’m this little kid they
find me and they say to me, ‘You speak so won-
derfully you must lead the people out of this
disaster.’” I never daydreamed about love or
money, I always daydreamed I was making el-
oquent speeches that stirred ten thousand peo-
ple to feel their lives, and to act.
This is the comedy of sincerity. What
is touching here is the child’s thirst for
recognition; what is funny is the gran-
diose form that thirst takes. Gornick
was a red-diaper baby, the daughter of
passionate socialists. It was only natu-
ral, when she closed her eyes at night,
that she imagined herself not in the
arms of a tall, handsome stranger but
on a soapbox, as the second coming of
Emma Goldman. But, if politics was
her birthright, her true love was litera-
ture. Novelists, too, can stir people to
feel their lives. After she left her par-
ents’ socialism behind (you can hear her
parodying it, affectionately, in the de-
scription of her childhood longing—
speeches, speeches, and more speeches),
Gornick dreamed of becoming a fiction
writer. Unfortunately, her characters re-
fused to come alive. “I couldn’t get them
in the room, out of the room,” she told
me recently. “They just lay there like a
dead dog.” But she could see what made
other people’s fiction work where hers
didn’t. So she became a critic.
Gornick was fifty-one in 1987, when
“Fierce Attachments,” the book that
made her name, was published. Now,
eight books later, she is eighty-four,
though you’d never know it. When I
went to see her in her West Village apart-
ment, on a late-December afternoon of
no particular significance to either of
us—“Two Jewish girls together on
Christmas, what could be better?” she
said to me over the phone, when we set
the date—she answered the door in
black leggings and chic wedge sandals,
looking like a ballet master. Her hair is
short and gray, her eyes very blue and
very big. She invited me to sit on the
couch, and arranged herself in an arm-
chair at a right angle to it, so that I had
to turn toward her as we spoke. Later,
it occurred to me that the setup mim-
icked that of analyst and analysand, with
me in the position of the patient.
Thanks to rent stabilization, Gornick
has lived in the apartment, a postwar
one-bedroom, for upward of thirty years;
her home, like her prose, is straightfor-
ward in style, unfussy, minimally but
functionally adorned. The table, couch,
and chairs are there to be used by the
body, not enjoyed by the eye. A scratch-
ing post had been put out for the benefit
of Boo and Puss, Gornick’s two cats,
who were doing sneaky things some-
where else. The apartment’s cherished
features are its wide bank of windows,
partly shrouded, during my visit, by con-
struction plastic and paraphernalia (Gor-
