Review by Booklist Review
The question of loneliness is explored from two very different perspectives. Gornick, the quintessential New Yorker, begins her series of personal essays with a walk down city streets, where the jostle of the masses feels like a caress for a woman who longs for touching yet relishes being alone in a crowd. From there, Gornick goes back to other times and other places where she's tried to make connections, analyzing (and occasionally overanalyzing) why these overtures succeeded or, in most cases, failed. Gornick writes compellingly about her loneliness, making it another character in her life, as real as any of the people she encounters. Although it sometimes seems obvious why Gornick has trouble meshing with coworkers and strangers (hey, Vivian, lighten up!), her intensity also shines a bright light on the reader's own dance with the joys of being alone and the fear of loneliness. A book that lulls, then pounces. Schreiber left Manhattan for a rural hamlet in upstate New York, where she rented an old house and took up fly-fishing. More interested in woodchucks and stray cats than meeting new people, Schreiber nevertheless must make her own peace with loneliness as she comes to terms with the death of her mother, father, and brother. If Gornick rails against loneliness, Schreiber attempts to flow with it. Here it is the natural world that seems like another character as it cushions her pain and occasionally clarifies it. A moving meditation. --Ilene Cooper
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Apparently Gornick writes only when she has something to say (Fierce Attachments was published in 1988), with the result that readers may not be conversant with her output of honed observations and unflinching conclusions. She is a New Yorker through and through. No place else in the country, or on the globe for that matter, nurtures her need for contact, variety and pure, random amazement. "The street," she tells us, "does for me what I cannot do for myself. On the street nobody watches, everyone performs." Everyone, that is, but Gornick. She watches a man and woman arguing on Ninth Avenue near the bus station; knowing nothing of the causes or the results of the situation becomes a part of the happening: "She too has New York kinky hair. For the moment that's comradeship enough." But there's more to these seven original essays than a hymn to Manhattan. There is also exploration of that most brutal and unconquerable of human sorrows, loneliness. One can learn more about the human soul from "On Living Alone" than can be absorbed on a first encounter. "Loneliness was me cut off from myself. Loneliness was the thing nothing out there could cure." Without even a flicker of self-pity, these short pieces bear rereading many times. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this gripping collection of personal essays, Gornick (How I Found America, LJ 7/91) delves beneath the surface of individual, community, and work. With honesty and insightfulness, she reflects on our fear of loneliness and sense of fragmentation and the survival techniques she and others employ at work and home. Gornick takes the reader with her for walks on New York City streets; onto academic campuses in New York, California, and New England; and to the Catskills, where she works. Gornick's clear writing and honest expression of her own need for personal connections, independence, and meaningful work make the reader feel like a participant-observer in all her experiences and personal encounters. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In these essays, journalist and essayist Vivian Gornick (Fierce Attachments, 1987) bravely faces--and, even more remarkable, clearly renders--loneliness and the ongoing search for human connection. Gornick brings us out on the striving, bustling streets of Manhattan, where she often finds herself walking, seeking a kind of company in the anonymous crowd. We follow her, too, into stifling, backbiting university communities where she has spent time as a visiting writing teacher, and to the Catskills, where, working as a waitress, she learned brutal lessons about human nature. She meditates painfully on a brilliant woman writer, a friend of hers, now dead, who was loved, even worshiped, by many people, yet spent her life evading intimacy. Gornick also devotes an essay to living alone; rethinking a dogmatic devotion to solitude--she once wrote a polemic called ``Against Marriage''--she ponders the ways in which, post-divorce, she has never really learned to live by herself. She is courageous in these pieces, both in what she will say and in what she is willing to see. Throughout, she beautifully articulates, from a feminist perspective, her struggle to work and create, and to from meaningful relationships with others. The collection's themes come together in a final essay on letter writing, in which she argues, that, though many complain that the telephone has killed the letter, both represent vital parts of life: the impulses to connect and to narrate. Gornick argues eloquently against choosing one form of expression over the other, though this essay is a little dated now that so many people, through e-mail, are charting a new course somewhere in between. Though Gornick's standards for quality conversation are higher than most people's--hence her vulnerability to the isolation that accompanies its absence--her hunger for connection and understanding resonates and inspires. Her prose is sharp and her characterizations--of her friends, modern life, and of herself-- ring true. (Author tour)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
