Later, it occurred to me that the setup mimicked that of analyst and analysand, with me in the position of the patient. She invited me to sit on the couch, and arranged herself in an armchair at a right angle to it, so that I had to turn toward her as we spoke. Her hair is short and gray, her eyes very blue and very big. When I went to see her in her West Village apartment, 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. Now, eight books later, she is eighty-four, though you’d never know it. Gornick was fifty-one in 1987, when “Fierce Attachments,” the book that made her name, was published. “They just lay there like a dead dog.” But she could see what made other people’s fiction work where hers didn’t. “I couldn’t get them in the room, out of the room,” she told me recently. Unfortunately, her characters refused to come alive. After she left her parents’ socialism behind (you can hear her parodying it, affectionately, in the description of her childhood longing-speeches, speeches, and more speeches), Gornick dreamed of becoming a fiction writer. Novelists, too, can stir people to feel their lives. But, if politics was her birthright, her true love was literature. It was only natural, 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. Gornick was a red-diaper baby, the daughter of passionate socialists. What is touching here is the child’s thirst for recognition what is funny is the grandiose form that thirst takes.

Vivian gornick memoir