The Odd Woman and the City (2015)

Two years ago I went Christmas shopping for a friend who writes well but who doesn't identify as a writer -- someone who was entering a program that required writing from her. I thought I would get her some books by non-fiction writers with whom she might identify, stylistically.

I had a couple books in mind, but I also thought to ask J.P., a bookseller I have come to know and trust, to recommend a book he had read recently that I could add to my pile. The book he recommended was Vivian Gornick's unfortunately titled The Odd Woman and the City: a Memoir (2015).

Turns out the books I gave my friend for Christmas were returned and exchanged for others. Which was fine, I didn't take it personally. But I remained curious about The Odd Woman and the City, so when I saw it at the Victoria Drive Value Village a couple weeks ago, for a tenth of what I paid for it, I added it to my latest haul of DVDs.

I am now on Page 53 of The Odd Woman (notice how I keep shortening the title?), and I have to say, this is one of the most honest and nicely-written books I have read in some time. Gornick, now 80, has lived a remarkable life, and yet it is by no means over. I expect Gornick continues to walk the city she has lived in all her life, commenting on what she sees, what has dogged her, and what of the future she is most interested in.

Here is a paragraph that comes early in the book, where Gornick writes of the bond between her and her walking mate, Leonard:

We share the politics of damage, Leonard and I. An impassioned sense of having been born into preordained social inequity burns brightly in each of us. Our subject is the unlived life. The question for each of us: Would we have manufactured the inequity had one not been there, ready-made -- he is gay, I am the Odd Woman -- for our grievances to make use of? To this question our friendship is devoted. The question, in fact, defines the friendship -- gives it its character and its idiom -- and has shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than any other intimacy I have known. (p. 4)