Vivian Gornick

• Name — Vivian Gornick • Born — 14 June 1935 • Birthplace — The Bronx, New York City, U.S. • Occupation — * Author • memoirist • essayist • Education — * City College of New York (BA) • New York University (MA) • University of California, Berkeley • Subject — Cultural history, memoir • Notable Works — Fierce Attachments (1987)

Vivian Gornick was born on June 14, 1935, in New York City to working-class Jewish immigrant parents from Ukraine. She was raised a "red diaper baby" in a tenement apartment, where her parents' Communist political ideals shaped her daily life, with newspapers like the Daily Worker and Morgen Freiheit as household staples. Her father, Louis, worked as a presser in a garment factory. Her mother, Bess, took an office job during World War II. This experience exposed Gornick to shifting gender dynamics from a young age, which would help shape her aspirations for women's rights in the future. In 1957, Gornick received a bachelor of arts degree from City College of New York and in 1960 a master of arts degree from New York University.

Gornick was a reporter for The Village Voice from 1969 to 1977. Her journalistic work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. In 1969, the radical feminist group New York Radical Feminists was founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt; Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was aided by Gornick's 1969 Village Voice essay, "The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs". At the end of the essay she announced the formation of the group, including a contact address and phone number, which raised considerable national interest from prospective members. Gornick has published over a dozen books, the most celebrated of which was Fierce Attachments (1987), a memoir about her long battle with her mother for independence. It was hailed by The New York Times for its "mesmerizing, thrilling" truths, and was selected in 2019 by The New York Times Book Review critics as the best memoir of the past 50 years. Her last published book is Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time, which appeared in 2021. In that same year, she was awarded the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction. Gornick taught writing at The New School. For the 2007–2008 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and in 2015 she served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.

• "What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me" (2002) The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0060936464

• |Year — Review article — Work(s) reviewed • 1996 • 2017