The Odd Woman and the City
Vivian Gornick
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.
Set in New York, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance meetings, and ever-changing relationships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city that has done the same.
Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick’s animated exchange of more than twenty years with her best friend Leonard, as well as interactions with grocers, doormen, people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful.
A narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, in this memoir we encounter Gornick’s rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.
‘A slim book with big echoes . . . She is as good a writer about friendship as we have.’ New York Times
‘An elusive and stirring memoir.’ Los Angeles Times
‘A series of sharply observed vignettes.’ New Yorker
‘Typically lucid . . . startling.’ Guardian