There is a rare breed of writer whose books defy easy categorisation, their subjects prone to meandering in an intellectually driven stream of consciousness across the page. They may touch upon fiction, memoir or even philosophy, but they delight mostly because they reveal a brilliant, and idiosyncratic, mind. In the UK there are, among others, Deborah Levy and Geoff Dyer; in the US, Sigrid Nunez and Vivian Gornick.
Gornick, 89, is a celebrated American writer not much known on these shores, although her work is diligently being resurrected by the wonderful Daunt Books. Having previously put out Fierce Attachments, the much-praised 1987 memoir about her complicated relationship with her mother, now it is republishing The Odd Woman and the City, a 150-page essay (originally published in the US in 2015) that casts Gornick as a modern-day flâneur traversing the streets of her beloved Manhattan, aiming both to keep loneliness at bay and to feed her insatiable writer’s curiosity.
