The Odd Woman and the City

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 glinting account of one woman’s peripatetic relationship with that fabled place . . . I loved this book.’ Claire Allfree, Daily Telegraph

‘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