{"id":1661575,"date":"2026-02-21T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/19\/\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T15:18:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T20:18:17","slug":"home-free-vivian-gornick","status":"publish","type":"daily","link":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/21\/home-free-vivian-gornick\/","title":{"rendered":"Home Free"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Vivian Gornick has been writing essays, memoir, and criticism for sixty years, beginning in 1965 when the Village Voice <\/em>published her response to a controversial speech made by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) at a gathering at the Village Vanguard. The subject of the gathering was \u201cArt and Politics,\u201d and in many ways Gornick has been addressing that same duality in her writing ever since: the art of the novel and the politics of feminism, the art of the self and the politics of the family, the art of love and the politics of hope. She has often returned to the theme of family relationships, including a book of literary criticism, The End of the Novel of Love<\/em> (1997), and a work of social history, The Romance of American Communism<\/em> (1977); Fierce Attachments<\/em> (1987), perhaps her best-known work, is a memoir about being raised in the Bronx by a working-class immigrant mother of Russian Jewish extraction. Her writing for the Review <\/em>has likewise touched on personal relationships in literature and life, including friends, classmates, husbands, lovers, and fathers in the work of Alfred Hayes, Tess Slesinger, Marina Jarre, Albert Camus, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the February 26, 2026, issue of the Review<\/em>, Gornick turns her attention to the relationship between a mother and a daughter<\/a> in Arundhati Roy\u2019s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me<\/em>, which chronicles Roy\u2019s childhood as the daughter of a well-known political activist in India. I emailed with Gornick to ask her about the challenges of the memoir form, the difficulty of writing about one\u2019s parents, and the relationship between personal and political lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Chandler Fritz:<\/em><\/strong> You write that \u201cthe memoir is rather like a novel in that it depends on dramatized storytelling for its success,\u201d yet you close by noting that even excellent novelists find that \u201cthe gift for memoir remains elusive.\u201d What accounts for this discrepancy? Is one\u2019s personal reality somehow resistant to the novelist\u2019s usual tools of dramatization? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vivian Gornick:<\/strong> Everything depends on the writer\u2019s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional \u201cI.\u201d The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It\u2019s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, \u201cThat\u2019s a novel!\u201d But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn\u2019t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two of the memoirs you cite as exemplars of the genre\u2014Edmund Gosse\u2019s <\/em>Father and Son and J.R. Ackerley\u2019s <\/em>My Father and Myself\u2014dramatize the filial relationship. To this list should be added, of course, <\/em>Fierce Attachments. What risks must a memoirist take to turn a parent into a strong literary character? <\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every writer, sooner or later, must face the fact that our characters are taken directly from our own lives, so there will be friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are going to feel like they\u2019ve been pushed under the bus. There\u2019s no way out of this one. In my own case, I often trembled at what I was doing, writing Fierce Attachments<\/em>, but then I\u2019d remind myself that my motives were honest, I wasn\u2019t setting out to trash Mama, I just wanted to tell hard truths. I had to believe that that would carry us through. And it did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Mary Roy, your mother was still alive when your memoir about her was published. How do you think that affected your task? How do you imagine that distinguished your work from Arundhati Roy\u2019s?<\/em> <\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you say, I was writing this book while Mama was still alive; that alone means I trusted my motives in taking possession of a piece of material I genuinely considered my own. After all, the book wasn\u2019t about<\/em> Mama, it was about me coming to maturity. Roy\u2019s book, however, is meant to be about her mother; in fact it is mainly about how mean and self-absorbed that mother was. That alone would have made Roy too anxious to write it while she was alive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In your review you note that Roy\u2019s home state of Kerala \u201cremains as suffocating for [her] today as it was in her childhood.\u201d When you were writing\u00a0<\/em>Fierce Attachments,\u00a0did you revisit\u00a0the Bronx tenements\u00a0where\u00a0you were raised?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its own way, the Bronx of my childhood was as oppressive to me as Roy\u2019s Kerala was to her\u2014and has remained so. I actually did make a number of trips back to the old neighborhood while I was writing the book, and though there had been many changes, it mainly felt the same: stifling. In this sense, though, usefully evocative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the truth of it is the outer boroughs of New York all feel that way to me. When I leave Manhattan it\u2019s always as though I\u2019m going to some depressing neighborhood in a small town\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve called yourself an \u201curban provincial\u201d before.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By \u201curban provincial\u201d I simply mean that I am urban\u2014not urbane. Living in one of the most important cities in the world has not made me worldly. I do not feel at home\u2014that is, possessed of a genuine sense of well-being\u2014anywhere except in New York City. That\u2019s rather provincial, wouldn\u2019t you say?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout your career, you\u2019ve written not just about the ideas of radical groups but about the spaces in which people shared their ideas: on walks, at lunches, in campus alcoves and \u201cconsciousness raising\u201d groups. What do we lose when radical thinking becomes disseminated across digital networks as opposed to concentrated in a time and place?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I understand the stunning achievement of the digital world, I really do. But the domination of \u201cvirtual reality,\u201d especially since the Covid crisis, is an unmitigated disaster. Working at home, shopping online, doing therapy online (!!!), for me this is all a cause for despair. The promise that the digital takeover was going to \u201cconnect\u201d us all to one another\u2014what a bad joke that has turned out to be. Many more people feel a thousand times more isolated than ever before with only their iPhones for company\u2026. No, no! Bring back life on the ground! Sometimes I\u2019m glad that I\u2019m as old as I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEvery writer, sooner or later, must face the fact that our characters are taken directly from our own lives, so there will be friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are going to feel like they\u2019ve been pushed under the bus.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":1661572,"template":"","categories":[1],"tags":[19050],"daily-type":[20614,9466],"coauthors":[8692,31300],"class_list":["post-1661575","daily","type-daily","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brief-encounters","daily-type-brief-encounters","daily-type-nyr-daily","author-roles-by","author-roles-interviewed-by","author-cap-vivian-gornick","author-cap-chandler-fritz"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/21\/home-free-vivian-gornick\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Home Free","url":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/21\/home-free-vivian-gornick\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/21\/home-free-vivian-gornick\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/gornick-022126-900.jpg?w=125","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/gornick-022126-900.jpg"},"articleSection":"Uncategorized","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Vivian Gornick"},{"@type":"Person","name":"Chandler Fritz"}],"creator":["Vivian Gornick","Chandler Fritz"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The New York Review of Books","logo":""},"keywords":["brief encounters"],"dateCreated":"2026-02-21T15:30:00Z","datePublished":"2026-02-21T15:30:00Z","dateModified":"2026-02-24T20:18:17Z"},"rendered":"