I first met Vivian Gornick through her writing. Her memoir, Fierce Attachments, had a powerful impact on me. I began to devour her books. While I was still teaching at San Diego State University, I suggested the organizers of the English Department’s Living Writers’ Series invite Vivian to present on her work and got to know her a little better in person. She’s an inveterate New Yorker, who wrote what I consider a love letter to the city in her Odd Woman and The City. She doesn’t mince words, whether it comes to her views about writers and writing, friendship, or love.
When The Situation and The Story came out in 2001, it served as an important source of inspiration and guidance for a graduate women’s studies course on writing I was teaching at San Diego State University, one of the last classes I taught before retiring. Some students complained about Vivian’s choice of so many male authors as examples of good writing, a point Vivian responded to with a characteristic smirk when I mentioned it to her years later. Still, they benefited from Vivian’s careful distinction between experiences or situations that may motivate a narrative and the story one tells about those experiences.
In 2005, I reread Vivian’s essay on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger in The End of the Novel of Love. I found her portrait of Arendt intriguing. By then, I’d retired from SDSU and was working on a book on Arendt. A colleague of mine and I had also just produced Kate Fodor’s play, Hannah and Martin, at the San Diego Repertory Theater. Even though I didn’t agree with everything Vivian had written about the Arendt/Heidegger affair, I invited her to give a lecture during the NEH seminar on Arendt I was to direct for a group of schoolteachers the following year Vivian gave a lively presentation, discussed her latest book, The Solitude of Self, and admitted the seminar members were more steeped in Arendt’s work than she was.
On the occasion of that visit, we had several discussions about writing, discovering points of coincidence and divergence in our opinions. I liked Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, she didn’t. I appreciated Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, she thought his brother Tobias’s memoir This Boy’s Life far superior. And so on.
We stayed in touch, on and off, over the years. When I was associate editor at Brevity during the first year of my M.F.A. studies at Fairfield University, I suggested to Dinty Moore, the editor, the possibility of interviewing Vivian and he agreed. I arranged to meet Vivian in New York and this three-part series was the result. It appeared in Brevity in 2019 and is worth the read.