I was on the phone to a friend recently, who asked me what I was reviewing. ‘It’s a book by a lady intellectual,’ I began. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t put that in your review.’ ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I replied, ‘but it is very important that she’s a woman.’
A self-described radical feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, Vivian Gornick says that that flame has died down a bit now (she was 79 when this book was first published ten years ago). Her perspective in this meandering, delightful memoir-cum-essay is still, obviously, feminine – yet there is a kind of detachment; and from what she says about her past life, and her experiences with men, and with love, there always was, in a way. Hence the ‘odd’ in the title.
For all the ways in which Gornick is an unconventional human being, this book contains some of the best, most keen-sighted writing on love I have ever read – although, to be strictly accurate, she is writing more about what love isn’t, or how it isn’t what you want it to be. For example:
Sometimes I’d feel puzzled about how I would manage life both as an agent of revolution and as a devotee of love. Inevitably, then, a picture formed itself of me on the stage, my face glowing with purpose, and an adoring man in the audience waiting for me to come down into his arms. That seemed to cover all the bases.
Things didn’t pan out like this, but she can see the drily funny side a half a century on.
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