Author(s): Vivian Gornick

Essay | Feminism | New York | Daunt Books Publishing

Vivian Gornick's writing has always explored the hard truths of existence: the nature of human loneliness, and the struggle to love, work, and connect. In these seven seminal essays Gornick chronicles the New York streets that energise her, and looks back on the dangerously charged atmosphere of the Catskills where she waitressed as a student in the late fifties. She describes her introduction to the feminism of the 1970s and the lessons it taught her, reflects on a friendship with an older female writer that faltered, and analyses the failure of connection among like-minded people. She considers what it means to live alone, and the absorbed solitude of writing letters. 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.

Review:

It is [Gornick's] particular genius to make readers feel what they are thinking . . . Brilliant, compelling, and cohesive. --Julia Markus, Los Angeles Times

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 . . . Without even a flicker of self-pity, these short pieces bear rereading many times. --Publishers Weekly

At heart this is a book not about repose but about escalating struggle--the day-to-day struggle to face down the brutality of growing loneliness, to accept the limitations of friendship and intimacy, to honor the process of becoming oneself. --Mary Hawthorne, The New York Times

Author Biography: Vivian Gornick is the author of several books, including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love, The Men in My Life, and The Odd Woman and the City. She began her career as a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications.