Vivian Gornick: Awareness of the self is more acutely at the heart of...

A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. 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.

Vivian Gornick

truth life believe

Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that

Vivian Gornick

radical-feminism choices heart

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading. How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all.

Vivian Gornick

reading writing fun

Every work [of literature] has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say

Vivian Gornick

plot emotional stories

We all grew up so utterly vulnerable, enthralled by romantic love as we knew it. First of all, it was pounded into you every which way that you've got to get married and you've got to have babies. That you're not a natural woman if you don't. So that led to a lot of sitting by the telephone and waiting for a call. And that led you into a culture in which you were always in a subordinate position without realizing it; hamstrung, not able to take action. That was the most important thing: you were always waiting to be desired.

Vivian Gornick

romantic-love waiting baby

The point of women's liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, 'Let me in, damn you, let me in!' The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.

Vivian Gornick

damn-you creating doors

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.

Vivian Gornick

money self ideas

Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.

Vivian Gornick

slave girl might

Adorable in her not-very-bright submissiveness, charming in her childlike delight in shiny floors, even forgivable in her spiteful competition for the whitest, brightest wash, Madison Avenue's girl-next door is all the American male could wish for: unless, by some miscarriage, he should fancy human companionship.

Vivian Gornick

miscarriage girl love

Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.

Vivian Gornick

papa boredom anxiety

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

Vivian Gornick

accomplished should said

Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rational, an enormous amount irrational. All political cruelties stem from that overwhelming fear. To push back the threatening forces, to offer primitive sacrifices, to give up some in the hope that others will be savedthat is the power struggle. That is the outsidedness of the poor, the feeble, the infantile. That is the outsidedness of Jews. That is the outsidedness of blacks. That is the outsidedness of women.

Vivian Gornick

giving-up pain fear

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that.

Vivian Gornick

unfaithful realizing believe

Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.

Vivian Gornick

political science art

Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew--and I knew it was important to know--that Papa worked hard all day long.

Vivian Gornick

girl brother work

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

Vivian Gornick

metaphor literature trying

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

Vivian Gornick

pain self mean

A people who have only just begun to emerge from a state of subjugation are in no position to be even-handed ... and it takes much patience and understanding and good will on the part of the strong ones both in the subjugated group and in the group holding the power to provide an atmosphere of stability in which the frightened bravado on both sides of the fence can dissipate itself without increasing the chaos that is already intrinsic in the situation.

Vivian Gornick

understanding strong people

The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.

Vivian Gornick

empty-rooms loneliness writing

I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.

Vivian Gornick

stories writing fiction