Approaching Eye Level
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Seminal essays on loneliness, living in New York, friendship, feminism, and writing from nonfiction master Vivian Gornick
Vivian Gornick's Approaching Eye Level is a brave collection of personal essays that finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, feminist) trying to observe herself and the world without sentiment, cynicism, or nostalgia. Whether walking along the streets of New York or teaching writing at a university, Gornick is a woman exploring her need for conversation and connection—with men and women, colleagues and strangers. She recalls her stint as a waitress in the Catskills and a failed friendship with an older woman and mentor, and reconsiders her experiences in the feminist movement, while living alone, and in marriage.
Turning her trademark sharp eye on herself, Gornick works to see her part in things—how she has both welcomed and avoided contact, and how these attempts at connections have enlivened and, at times, defeated her. First published in 1996, Approaching Eye Level is an unrelentingly honest collection of essays that finds Gornick at her best, reminding us that we can come to know ourselves only by engaging fully with the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
