Vivian Gornick

Vivian Gornick (ca. 1935- ) is an American critic, essayist, and memoirist. For many years she wrote for the Village Voice. She currently teaches writing at The New School. For the 2007-2008 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She caused a controversy when she said that she had invented parts of Fierce Attachments, her largely autobiographical work.

Quotes

"[Y]ou cannot teach people how to write--the gift of dramatic expressiveness, of a natural sense of structure, of making language sink down beneath the surface of description, all that is inborn, cannot be taught--but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgment about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others." [from The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001)]

"Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work." [from The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001)]

"Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that." -- Vivian Gornick, "The Daily Illini," April 25, 1981

Partial Bibliography

• The Men in My Life (2008, MIT Press) [National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for criticism]
• The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2005, FSG)
• The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001, FSG)
• The End of the Novel of Love (1997, Beacon Press)
• Approaching Eye Level (1996)
• Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987, FSG)
• Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory (1983)
• Essays in Feminism (1978)
• The Romance of American Communism (1977)

External links

• Template:Worldcat id
• Interview with Gornick in the Boston Review