Gornick

The result is an intense, engrossing essay written with an allusive, sinuous style that so effectively entwines with the lives of the two women that the reader is not always sure if Ms. Gornick is referring to Goldman or to herself.

Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist Fred Siegel 2011

Goldman, Ms. Gornick says, "was not a thinker, she was an incarnation," a "depth of spirit."

Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist Fred Siegel 2011

Goldman has been assigned to Vivian Gornick, herself a radical, a feminist and a memoirist whose ideas have been deeply influenced by her subject.

Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist Fred Siegel 2011

Ms. Gornick reflects on the "raging intemperateness" of the era's feminist rhetoric—"marriage is an institution of oppression"; "love is rape"; "sleeping with the enemy"—and realizes now that reform wasn't the goal.

Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist Fred Siegel 2011

Ms. Gornick, with her own fascination for political passion, is especially insightful about Goldman's particular brand of engagement.

Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist Fred Siegel 2011

Yet Ms. Gornick is not so unswerving in her own radicalism.

Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist Fred Siegel 2011

In "The Romance of American Communism" 1977, Gornick insisted that communists were the best people because, whatever their failings, they, like Emma Goldman, were more intense, more passionate than others.

Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist Fred Siegel 2011

The journalist, essayist, and memoirist Vivian Gornick manages to turn the inevitable invisibility of older women into something positive in “Even Smart Women Hate Losing Their Youthful Looks”:

In the Fullness of Time Emily W. Upham 2010

Vivian Gornick is a literary journalist whose many books include essays, memoirs, criticism, and biography.

In the Fullness of Time Emily W. Upham 2010

All that such works accomplish, in my opinion, is to encourage the idea, which Gornick expresses here, that what readers need is to know "something true about the man who wrote Moby-Dick."

Canonical Writers 2008