Vivian Gornick Quotes

You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.

If you don't leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently...

We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman's life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.

...the men are undone by the need to master, and the women by the power of self-doubt.

«Si no te vas de casa te sofocas, si te vas demasiado lejos te falta oxígeno», asegura Vivian Gornick con toda razón.

Very young, I was not able to find myself interesting without intelligent response. I required the company of minds attuned to my own, but no one around gave me back the words I needed to hear.

Fue en la cocina donde empecé a comprender el significado de la palabra "esposa”. Ahí estábamos, una pareja de 24 años: un día éramos una estudiante de doctorado y un artista, y al día siguiente éramos marido y mujer. Antes siempre habíamos puesto juntos sobre la mesa las rudimentarias comidas que tomábamos. Ahora, de pronto, Stefan estaba cada noche en su taller, dibujando o leyendo y yo estaba en la cocina, esforzándome por preparar y servir una comida que ambos pensábamos que debía ser adecuada. Recuerdo pasar me cobra y media preparando algún espantoso plato de cuchara sacado de una revista femenina para terminar engulléndolo los dos en 10 minutos, pasarme después una hora limpiando los cacharros y quedarme mirando el fregadero, pensando: "¿Será esto así durante los siguientes cuarenta años?”.

And I—the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image—I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.

Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard work.

Man is free only when he is doing what the deepest self likes, and knowing what the deepest self likes, ah! that takes some diving.

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in a void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom—or rather the movement towards it—that counts.

Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it. They mimic the recalled gestures and mannerisms of the women they’ve been trained to become and hope for the best.

That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.

I was never going to know what Keats knew before he was twenty-five, that “any set of people is as good as any other.” Now there was a Shakespearean life. Keats occupied his own experience to such a remarkable degree, he needed only the barest of human exchanges to connect with an inner clarity he himself had achieved. For that, almost anyone would do. He lived inside the heaven of a mind nourished by its own conversation. I would wander for the rest of my life in the purgatory of self-exile, always looking for the right person to talk to. This

New York isn’t jobs, they reply, it’s temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.

One's own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one's friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities - the fear, the anger, the humiliation - that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company... What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.

Everyone used to seem so grown up," I say. "Nobody does anymore. Look at us. Forty, fifty years ago we would have been our parents. Who are we now?" ... "They passed," Leonard says, "that's all." Fifty years ago you entered a closet marked 'marriage.' In the closet was a double set of clothes, so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A woman stepped into a dress called 'wife' and the man stepped into a suit called 'husband.' And that was it. They disappeared inside the clothes. Today, we don't pass. We're standing here naked. That's all." He strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette. "I'm not the right person for this life," I say. "Who is?" he says, exhaling in my direction.

Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.

In 1907 Edmund Gosse thought he had to leave his father to become himself; seventy years later Geoffrey Wolff knows he cannot leave his father because he has become his father.

Agnes Smedley also knows what the century knows: that we become what is done to us.

Una mujer sabe si ama a un hombre", decía. "Si no está segura, es que no lo ama

It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it. (On her mother)

Everyone who had ever cared to investigate the nature of human loneliness had seen that only one’s own working mind breaks the solitude of the self.

As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.

Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping ground into which exceptional writers pour all the art they are capable of making.

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.

At the very center of all human life is energy, psychic energy. It is the force of that energy that drives us, that surges continually up in us, that must repeatedly spend and renew itself in us, that must perpetually be reaching for something beyond itself in order to satisfy its own insatiable appetite.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.

Durante años me dije: "Por la mañana". Lo que, claro está, nunca ocurrió.

When was the first I knew something about her in a world where men were sex, but women?—weren’t we just supposed to get out of the way when we saw it coming?

She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She

All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine.

The exchange will always deepen, even if the friendship does not.

In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

I had an affair with a downtown playwright. Two things about this man: He was an ex-alcoholic, and he was phobic about leaving the city. I was too old to think him poetic, but I did.

Responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader--no less than between people--is that deepest of all human mysteries, emotional readiness: upon which the shape of every life is vitally dependent. How morbidly circumstantial life can seem when we think of the apparent randomness with which we welcome or repel what will turn out to be--or what might have turned out to be--some of the most important relationships of our lives. How often have lifelong friends or lovers shuddered to think, 'If I had met you at any other time...' It's the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness.

-No lo sé. Lo único que sé es que es lista, que se merece una formación y que la va a tener. Éstos son los Estados Unidos. Las chicas no son vacas que pacen a la espera de que las crucen con un toro.

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

This is the intimacy that will bind us all our lives, holding us forever to the task implicit in all love relations: how to connect yet not merge, how to respond yet not be absorbed, how to detach but not withdraw.

Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live got to be as it is. No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.

We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. Under its influence we gave up neither our fears nor our angers. Within ourselves we remained unchanged. The development was an astonishment: not at all what had been expected. The atmosphere became charged with revelation, and it altered us permanently as a culture.

Ever since I could remember, I had feared being found wanting. If I did the work I wanted to do, it was certain not to measure up; if I pursued the people I wanted to know, I was bound to be rejected; if I made myself as attractive as I could, I would still be ordinary looking. Around such damages to the ego a shrinking psyche had formed: I applied myself to my work, but only grudgingly; I’d make one move toward people I liked, but never two; I wore makeup but dressed badly. To do any or all of these things well would have been to engage heedlessly with life — love it more than I loved my fears — and this I could not do. What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: to go on yearning for “things” to be different so that I would be different.

Once again, as it has with irregular regularity throughout my waking life, that sickening sense of language buried deep within comes coursing through arms, legs, chest, throat. If only I could make it reach the brain, the conversation with myself might perhaps begin.

The imaginable had always been problematic. When I was a child the feel of things went into me: deep, narrow, intense. The grittiness of the street, the chalk-white air of the drugstore, the grain of the wooden floor in the storefront library, the blocks of cheese in the grocery-store refrigerator. I took it all so seriously, so literally. I was without imagination. I paid a kind of idiot attention to the look and feel of things, leveling an intent inner stare at the prototypic face of the world. These streets were all streets, these buildings all buildings, these women and men all women and men. I could imagine no other than that which stood before me. That child’s literalness of the emotions continued to exert influence, as though a shock had been administered to the nervous system and the flow of imagination had stopped. I could feel strongly, but I could not imagine. The granite gray of the street, the American-cheese yellow of the grocery store, the melancholy brownish tint of the buildings were all still in place, only now it was the woman on the couch, the girl hanging out the window, the confinement that sealed us off, on which I looked with that same inner intentness that had always crowded out possibility as well as uncertainty. It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression.

It was through the discovery and exploration of the unconscious that Freud made his major discoveries, chief among them that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don't want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions---anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate---yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with. Our very suffering is a source of both pain and reassurance. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients was the resistance to being cured.

it is the narrator who is the “agent”: he himself is the unifying idea. Not through what he tells us about himself or even through what he sees as he travels, but through the way he sees what he sees. It is the character of the persona’s perspective that provides the narrative its striking inner life.

Min mors ønsker er simple, men de er ikke til forhandling. Hun oplever dem som nødvendigheder. Lige nu er hun nødt til at have en kop kaffe. Det vil ikke være muligt at komme uden om dette ønske, som hun kalder et behov, før hun holder kruset med den dampende varme væske i sin hånd og fører det op til munden.

The live, warm presence of my mother had disappeared. In its place stood this remoteness posing as Mama. Her anxiety was unbearable to me. It made me crazy. I needed her to respond, to be there with me. I needed it. Not getting what I needed, I fell into an anxiety of my own that rendered me nearly speechless.

Durante mucho tiempo, bastantes años, de hecho, Stefan y yo describimos la tensión que había entre nosotros, intensidad. (Sabíamos que la tensión era para mal, pero la intensidad, ¡oh, la intensidad!). Hacer el amor era casi invariablemente una experiencia fuerte y explosiva una liberación acumulada de la tristeza que marcaba tantos de nuestros días. La atmósfera de nuestras primeras discusiones nunca se disipó, poco a poco nos acostumbramos a ella como se acostumbra uno a un peso sobre el corazón que constriñe la libertad de movimiento pero que no impide la movilidad: muy pronto, caminar contraído se vuelve natural.

If she would work he wouldn’t have to keep her in the house. She wouldn’t be crazy, and she could tell him to go to hell. Did you ever think about that, my brilliant daughter? That maybe she’s crazy because she can’t tell him to go to hell? When a woman can’t tell a man to go to hell, I have noticed, she is often crazy.

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over the 'emptiness of a woman's life' as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analysed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley. Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion?

Collectively speaking, if we chart the internal mood of every successful movement for social integration we find that, ironically, with each advance made it is anger—not hope, much less elation—that deepens in the petitioners at the gate. Ironic but not surprising: to petition repeatedly is to be reminded repeatedly that one is not wanted, never had been, never will be.

Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that -- with or without the burden of social justice -- the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary. Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort.

My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involved the expectancy. "We are one," I decided shortly after we met. "You are me, and I am you, and it is our obligation to save each other." It took me years for me to realize this sentiment was off the mark. What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports.

Pero no lo pilla. No sabe que estoy siendo irónica. Ni tampoco sabe que me ha dejado hecha polvo. No sabe que me tomo su angustia de manera personal, que me siento aniquilada por su depresión. ¿Cómo puede saberlo? Ni siquiera sabe que estoy delante de ella. Si le contase que para mí es como la muerte que ni siquiera sepa que estoy ahí, me miraría desde esos ojos en los que se agolpa una aflicción desconcertada, esta niña de setenta y siete años, y gritaría airada: –¡ No lo entiendes! ¡No lo has entendido nunca!

Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

We arrive at 69th Street, turn the corner, and walk toward the entrance to the Hunter auditorium. The doors are open. Inside, two or three hundred Jews sit listening to the testimonials that commemorate their unspeakable history. These testimonials are the glue that binds. They remind and persuade. They heal and connect. Let people make sense of themselves. ... 'Come inside,' she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. 'Come, you'll feel better.' I shake my head no. 'Being Jewish can't help me anymore,' I tell her.

Min mors sorg var primitiv og altomfattende: Den sugede ilten ud af luften. En tung, bedøvet fornemmelse fyldte mit hoved og min krop hver gang jeg kom hjem. Ingen af os – hverken min bror eller jeg selv, og da slet ikke min mor – fandt trøst i hinandens selskab. Vi var bare i eksil sammen, fanget i en fælles lidelse. For første gang var jeg bevidst om, at jeg blev grebet af åndelig ensomhed, og jeg kiggede ud på gaden, vendte mig mod de drømmende og melankolske indre anelser, der var blevet den eneste lindring fra det jeg hurtigt opfattede som en tilstand af tab og nederlag.

A lot of it was just sheer grinding shitwork. You think making a revolution is all agony and ecstasy? It's not, it's mostly drudgery. Hard, disciplined, repetitive work that's boring and necessary. But what keeps you going is that twenty times a week something would happen—out there in that lousy capitalist world or inside among your comrades—and you'd remember. You'd remember why you were here, and what you were doing it all for, and it was like a shot of adrenalin coursing through your veins. The world was all around you ail the time. That was the tremendous thing about those times. The sense of history that you lived with daily. The sense of remaking the world. Every time I wrote a leaflet or marched on a picket line or went to a meeting I was remaking the world.

WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY

Viví en aquel bloque de pisos entre los seis y los veintiún años. En total había veinte apartamentos, cuatro por planta, y lo único que recuerdo es un edificio lleno de mujeres. Apenas recuerdo a ningún hombre. Estaban por todas partes, claro está –maridos, padres, hermanos–, pero sólo recuerdo a las mujeres. Y las recuerdo a todas tan toscas como la señora Drucker o tan feroces como mi madre. Nunca hablaban como si supiesen quiénes eran, como si comprendieran el trato que habían hecho con la vida, pero a menudo actuaban como si lo supiesen. Astutas, irascibles, iletradas, parecían sacadas de una novela de Dreiser. Había años de aparente calma y, de repente, cundían el pánico y la locura: dos o tres vidas marcadas (quizá arruinadas) y el tumulto se apagaba. De nuevo calma silenciosa, letargo erótico, la normalidad de la abnegación cotidiana. Y yo –la niña que crecía entre todas ellas, formándose a su imagen y semejanza– me empapaba de ellas como de cloroformo impregnado en un paño apretado contra mi cara. He tardado treinta años en entender cuánto entendí de ellas.

My father had a sister, Mady, who had married badly and ‘ruined her life.’ Her story was a classic. She had fallen in love before the war with an American adventurer, married him against her family’s wishes, and been disinherited by my grandfather. Mady followed her husband romantically across the sea. In America he promptly abandoned her. By the time my parents arrived in America Mady was already a broken woman, sick and prematurely old, living a life two steps removed from destitution. My father, of course, immediately put her on an allowance and made her welcome in his home. But the iron laws of Victorian transgression had been set in motion and it was really all over for Mady. You know what it meant for a woman to have been so disgraced and disinherited in those years? She had the mark of Cain on her. She would live, barely tolerated, on the edge of respectable society for the rest of her life. A year after we arrived in America, I was eleven years old, a cousin of mine was married out of our house. We lived then in a lovely brownstone on New York’s Upper West Side. The entire house had been cleaned and decorated for the wedding. Everything sparkled and shone, from the basement kitchen to the third-floor bedrooms. In a small room on the second floor the women gathered around the bride, preening, fixing their dresses, distributing bouquets of flowers. I was allowed to be there because I was only a child. There was a bunch of long-stemmed roses lying on the bed, blood-red and beautiful, each rose perfection. Mady walked over to them. I remember the other women were wearing magnificent dresses, embroidered and bejeweled. Mady was wearing only a simple white satin blouse and a long black skirt with no ornamentation whatever. She picked up one of the roses, sniffed deeply at it, held it against her face. Then she walked over to a mirror and held the rose against her white blouse. Immediately, the entire look of her plain costume was altered; the rose transferred its color to Mady’s face, brightening her eyes. Suddenly, she looked lovely, and young again. She found a long needle-like pin and began to pin the rose to her blouse. My mother noticed what Mady was doing and walked over to her. Imperiously, she took the rose out of Mady’s hand and said, ‘No, Mady, those flowers are for the bride.’ Mady hastily said, ‘Oh, of course, I’m sorry, how stupid of me not to have realized that,’ and her face instantly assumed its usual mask of patient obligation. “I experienced in that moment an intensity of pain against which I have measured every subsequent pain of life. My heart ached so for Mady I thought I would perish on the spot. Loneliness broke, wave after wave, over my young head and one word burned in my brain. Over and over again, through my tears, I murmured, ‘Unjust! Unjust!’ I knew that if Mady had been one of the ‘ladies’ of the house my mother would never have taken the rose out of her hand in that manner. The memory of what had happened in the bedroom pierced me repeatedly throughout that whole long day, making me feel ill and wounded each time it returned. Mady’s loneliness became mine. I felt connected, as though by an invisible thread, to her alone of all the people in the house. But the odd thing was I never actually went near her all that day. I wanted to comfort her, let her know that I at least loved her and felt for her. But I couldn’t. In fact, I avoided her. In spite of everything, I felt her to be a pariah, and that my attachment to her made me a pariah, also. It was as though we were floating, two pariahs, through the house, among all those relations, related to no one, not even to each other. It was an extraordinary experience, one I can still taste to this day. I was never again able to address myself directly to Mady’s loneliness until I joined the Communist Party. When I joined the Party the stifled memory of that strange wedding day came back to me. . .

Lo amaba, de verdad lo amaba. Pero sólo hasta cierto punto. Más allá de ese punto, había algo opaco en mí que no cedía. Podía ver la opacidad. Podía palparla y saborearla.

Sus deseos son simples, pero innegociables. Los experimenta como necesidades.

My mother was kind,” she said. “She had a kind heart. Your mother? She was organized. My mother would sit up with her own kids when they were sick, and she’d sit up with you, too. Your mother would march into the kitchen like a top sergeant and say to my mother, ‘Levinson, stop crying, put on a brassiere, fix yourself up.

It has come to my attention lately,” he says, “that sales are up on suntan lotion and sunblock. Now who do you think are the customers for this item? I’ll tell you who. White people, that’s who. Not you or I, brother. No, it’s white people.” His voice deepens. “Now what do you think of a people who keep telling us they’re superior, and…” Without warning he pauses, his eyes squeeze shut, and he screams, “They can’t even make it in the fuckin’ sun!” Back to broadcast news. “You—” He points calmly at the heads of the fleeing crowd. “The white people. Don’t even belong. On the planet.

I nearly weep. All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am still certain that if she had been, I’d have grown up whole inside. “Imagine,” I say to Leonard. “She’s so old and she can still do this to me.” “It’s not how old she is that’s remarkable,” he says. “It’s how old you are.

No, what mattered here was that Alice had spent a lifetime struggling to become a conscious human being whose primary delight was the use of her own mind; and now she was locked up in an atmosphere constructed to ignore—nay, discard—that long, valiant effort, when the only thing owed a human being—yes, from first to last—was to have it honored.

i could not but be moved -- by the great and the humble alike -- to pity and admiration for those who demonstrated repeatedly that to ' be and do' is not a given.

Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments

One afternoon, nosing through a used bookstore, I picked up a book by Vivian Gornick and found myself reading about her decision in the early 1970s to leave her husband and live by herself. She’d been exactly my age. She woke to their first morning apart infatuated with solitude. “The idea of love seemed an invasion,” she wrote. “I had thoughts to think, a craft to learn, a self to discover. Solitude was a gift. A world was waiting to welcome me if I was willing to enter it alone.

Come quasi tutti i lettori, a volte ho la sensazione di essere nata leggendo".

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

La gran ilusión de nuestra cultura es que somos lo que confesamos ser,

La gran ilusión de nuestra cultura es que somos lo que confesamos ser.

El mundo es un espacio acotado lleno de obsesiones. Recorro su extensión con aire lúgubre y ojos fijos, una mujer moderna condenada a saber que la experiencia del amor se volverá a reproducir repetidamente a una escala cada vez menor, pero siempre con un complemento íntegro de fiebre y náusea, intensidad y negación.

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.

She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?

As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human - the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques - was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. That refusal became company. I was never less alone than alone in the crowded street. Here, I found, I could imagine myself. Here, I thought, I am buying time. What a notion: buying time.

Así que estaban los Kerner, llenos de odio, entrelazados en secreto por el espasmo sexual, y estaban mis padres, que se llamaba el uno al otro pero cuyo lecho campaba castamente en campo abierto. Abajo la casa un desastre, el marido estaba exiliado en el salón, a las posar una soñadora medio lunática; arriba todo estaba como una patena el marido en el centro de todo y la esposa, vehemente y obstinada.

La infelicidad está tan viva hoy en día

—Sigues eligiendo a tipos marginales como este, idealizándolos y luego no te entra en la cabeza que no sepan a lo que están. Te asombra que te hagan esto a ti. ¿No se dan cuenta de que deberías ser tú la que los dejara a ellos, no ellos a ti? Y luego actúas con superioridad.

[...]por encima de todo lo demás, lo que procura la lectura es un alivio puro y duro del caos mental. A veces creo que me infunde por sí sola valor para vivir, y lo ha hecho desde mi más tierna infancia.

La libertad sin matices no es libertad ni es nada. Son los matices los que nos hacen actuar como seres humanos civilizados, incluso cuando no nos sentimos como seres humanos civilizados. Si eliminamos todos los matices, nos queda solamente la vida animal: en otras palabras, la guerra.

Mourning Papa became her profession, her identity, her persona. Years later, when I was thinking about the piece of politics inside of which we had all lived (Marxism and the Communist Party), and I realized that people who worked as plumbers, bakers, or sewing-machine operators had thought of themselves as thinkers, poets, and scholars because they were members of the Communist Party, I saw that Mama had assumed her widowhood in much the same way. It elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech. Papa’s death became a religion that provided ceremony and doctrine. A woman-who-has-lost-the-love-of-her-life was now her orthodoxy: she paid it Talmudic attention. Papa had never been so real to me in life as he was in death. Always a somewhat shadowy figure, benign and smiling, standing there behind Mama’s dramatics about married love, he became and remained what felt like the necessary instrument of her permanent devastation. It was almost as though she had lived with Papa in order that she might arrive at this moment. Her distress was so all-consuming it seemed ordained.

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 in gathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.

Al final de cada velada que pasamos juntos, uno de los dos, llevado por el entusiasmo, sugiere que nos veamos durante la semana, pero ese impulso raramente dura lo bastante como para materializarse. Lo decimos de corazón, por supuesto, al despedirnos -no hay nada que deseemos más que volver a vernos inmediatamente-, pero mientras subo el ascensor a mi apartamento, empiezo a sentir los efectos de una noche cargada de ironía y juicios negativos. No es grave, son solo heridas leves -miles de punzadas diminutas me acribillan los brazos, el cuello, el pecho-, pero en algún lugar de mi interior, en algún sitio que ni siquiera soy capaz de identificar, empiezo a encogerme ante la perspectiva de volver a sentirme así demasiado pronto.

As yet, there was nothing for it but to endure. We became fond of responding to irony in novels of love as one would to a finger pressed against the flesh near an open sore.

Johnson odiaba y temía la vida en un pueblo. Las calles cerradas y silenciosas lo sumían en la desesperación. En un pueblo, su presencia no encontraba reflejo. La soledad se volvía insoportable. La ciudad tenía sentido porque hacía soportable la soledad.

La desaparició del sentiment en l’amor romàntic és un drama que la majoria de nosaltres coneixem i, per això, ens pensem que podem trobar-hi una explicació. Esclaus de la intensitat generada per la passió, conferim a l’amor uns poders transformadors; imaginem que sota la seva influència serem persones noves, fins i tot completes. Quan l’esperada transformació no es materialitza, les esperances, junt amb l’enamorament, es dissolen abruptament. L’emoció de sentir que l’amant et coneix ara s’esvaeix i es transforma en ansietat de sentir-se exposat. Tant en l’amistat com en l’amor, l’expectativa que la versió expressiva (si no la millor) d’un mateix es desclourà en presència de l’estimat és essencial. Tot es planteja a partir d’aquesta desclosa. Però, i si tot allò que tenim d’inquiet, fluid i volàtil dins nostre mina constantment la cosa que, ens sembla, més volem? I si, de fet, l’assumpció d’un jo que necessita expressivitat és una il·lusió? I si l’impuls cap a una intimitat estable es veu perpètuament amenaçat per un altre impuls igual de gran, o més i tot, cap a la desestabilització? Què passa aleshores?

Si mi madre no era capaz de identificar en otra mujer reacciones a un marido o un amante que duplicasen las suyas, no lo consideraba amor. Y el amor, decía, lo era todo. La vida de una mujer estaba determinada por el amor. Cualquier indicio que probase lo contrario —y las pruebas, de hecho, abundaban— era descartado e ignorado por sistema, tachado de su discurso y vetado por su intelecto.

As Anton Chekhov so memorably put it, 'Others made me a slave but I must squeeze the slave out of me drop by drop.

In the late 1950s Leslie Fiedler observed that the Jewish-American novelist had internalized the stereotype of the Jew in American literature. When he sat down to write, he had trouble shaking off the hostile or sentimental images that appeared regularly in the work of gentile writers. It is impossible to overestimate the value of such an insight.

[V S Naipaul] brings to [literary narrative] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought. Observe hard, think even harder, figure out what you are thinking in the simplest, clearest language, and you will arrive at narrative: that is his credo.

It is fortification from the inside out that is wanted—the kind accomplished only by those prepared to do batter for a piece of emotional ground that must be taken again and again before it is actually secured.

The life we lead as writers is awful—it’s boring, tedious, lonely,” -Vivian Gornick