Vivian Gornick is baffled by her sudden popularity among a new generation of leftists. At the age of 84, she’s become “quite a literary figure, well beyond her own very modest expectations for herself”
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Gornick, likewise, does not seek the spotlight. Though she deserves as much credit as any writer alive for codifying the current form of the personal essay — The Paris Review has credited her with pioneering the genre of “personal criticism” now associated with essayists such as Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, and Jia Tolentino — her influence as a writer has always outstripped her exposure.
It’s hard to say why Gornick didn’t gain her current following earlier. Maybe she was just ahead of her time, writing memoir before the genre’s boom in the late 1990s, or maybe — by writing about feminism and politics with the sensibility of a literary critic, and vice versa — she slipped through the cracks between easily marketable categories.
By the mid-1970s, her relationship with the movement had started to sour. Gornick perceived an emerging party line that seemed to mirror the one that had silenced her parents’ doubts about the Soviet Union: When she disagreed with a speaker at a feminist meeting in Boston, the woman accused her of being “an intellectual and a revisionist.” “I realized that feminism wasn’t enough to understand my place in society or in history,” she tells me. “It was not going to give me inner peace.
At the Voice, Gornick was, by her own account, a polemicist “on the barricades for radical feminism.” After she left the paper, the year Romance was published, her work moved toward memoir and literary criticism and away from orthodoxy of any kind. “If anyone picks up a book of mine, it’s eminently clear that a feminist is writing,” she says, “no matter what I’m writing about.
But doesn’t she feel the earliest vibrations of something shifting, I ask? Even if she is unmoved by the progressive candidates running for president, what about the regroupings of the labor movement, the mainstreaming of Medicare for All discourse, or, yes, the thousands of young socialists expected to provide an audience for her decades-old book? “It doesn’t feel like right before the ’60s, even though things are worse than they were right before the ’60s,” she says.
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