Vivian Gornick: ‘Thinking is the hardest thing in the world'

Vivian Gornick should be used to things happening later than expected. She was 51 when she published the book that finally made her name in 1987 (Fierce Attachments, a memoir about her relationship with her mother; it was described by the New York Times last year as the best memoir of the past half century), and only now does she find herself, for the first time in her life, financially solvent. “It’s true,” she says, astonishment just at the edge of her voice. “I lived from hand to mouth for 40 years, and I never cared that much about it. Except that now I do have some money, I realise it was a weight on me.” But the new wave of interest in her work has, nevertheless, come as a complete surprise: “I don’t really understand why it has happened. But I’m glad I lived long enough to see it.”

In February she published, aged 84, a new collection of essays, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, in which she revisits the authors she loved as a younger woman, among them DH Lawrence and Colette. This was marked by an admiring profile in the New Yorker. Meanwhile, in the UK, where Gornick has always been less well known, two of her earlier books have been reissued this year: first, The Romance of American Communism (1977), a work of oral history inspired by her working-class Jewish, New York roots, and now Approaching Eye Level (1996), which gathers together a series of pieces whose broad theme might be said to encompass the ongoing struggle of living freely and independently as a woman. In one, she describes how, in 1970, she discovered feminism, having been dispatched by the Village Voice to investigate “these women’s libbers” (meeting Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett and others galvanised her like nothing else: feminism finally brought her to take herself seriously). In another, she relates her fractious, complex friendship with an older writer called Rhoda Munk, a magnetic “repository of extremity” who first drew Gornick to her and then, painfully, turned her away. (“No one she knew could fill her up,” she writes. “If she swallowed all of us at once she’d still be hungry.”)

Gornick had to fight her editor for the title Approaching Eye Level: “I burst out like a child: ‘No, I must have this one!’ It came from a piece in which I said that a time will come when men and women will approach each other at eye level – an idea, and a phrase, to which I was devoted.” And are we there yet? In my ear – she’s in New York and I’m in London – I hear some surprisingly high-pitched laughter. “No! It’s a much longer struggle than we ever dreamed of, and it’s painful to see how the same battles must be fought again and again. When #MeToo happened in 2017, I couldn’t believe my ears. They were saying everything we’d said 40 years ago. But then I realised that every generation repeats and repeats – until it’s over. It isn’t over until it’s over.”

Will #MeToo ultimately take us anywhere? She is doubtful. “I think to a large degree things may go back pretty much to where they were. However, many thousands of men are changed, and just as many women. Again, it’s two steps forward and one back, if we’re lucky.” The present generation of feminists is, she believes, angrier than her own, but it also has less “visionary fervour… we were amazed at what we were discovering; no one had ever seen women, historically, as cultural creations before”. It strikes her that some younger women have too little interest in those who paved the way: “They’re making use of the things that we taught them, but they’ve no respect for history.”

But the new edition of Approaching Eye Level is almost guaranteed to find avid younger readers, combining as it does personal stories with bigger questions of identity and autonomy (and it’s impossible not to fall in love with Gornick on the page: her spare, metronomic prose, her hard-won wisdom, her drollery). “Loneliness, the difficulty involved in becoming an independent yet attached person, and the way to find a reasonable agreement between these two positions: these are existential questions, and that’s where the women’s movement tapped in so deep by asking them,” she says. “But to name these things is not to cure them. It’s a battle every day. We struggle to bring to life what we say and believe. Our insides tell us one thing, but living that out is quite another.”

Was it because she was a woman that it took her a little while to get going as a writer? “Oh, yes. My late blooming was very much attached to my being a girl. It’s a major thing, being a girl. But after that, you also have to figure in the personal neuroses of each human being. I was smart. My mother saw it, and decided I should get an education – but I had to remember that love was the most important thing in a woman’s life. College was only to protect me against the possibility that my husband would die or leave me stranded.” Notions like this were hard, if not impossible, to shake off: “I was so hesitant to believe in myself.”

Gornick grew up in the Bronx, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants. As a smaller child, her parents’ “anxiety-ridden experience of life on the periphery” framed her life. But when she was 13, things took a dramatic turn for the worse. Her father, a presser in a garment factory, died, at which point her mother, dazed by her abandonment, took to the sofa, refusing to get up – a situation that lasted for years, and that Gornick describes so brilliantly in Fierce Attachments (if she’s horrified by it, she also has a certain stunned admiration for her mother’s implacable devotion to her misery). Her mother’s shadow is long: “I often think I see her in the street, and when that happens, I say to myself: ‘Oh, you bitch, you’ll be with me for ever’, even if I also feel some amusement, affection and guilt over my own bad behaviour.”

She began working as a journalist after university, publishing her first book in 1973. But she’s not someone who has ever found writing easy. “Some part of me is not as frightened as I used to be,” she says. “I know that eventually the mind will clear. But as VS Pritchett said when he was old: every time I start again, it’s a break with terror. Thinking is the hardest thing in the world. The mind resists order.” How to get over the agonising feeling you’ll never quite be able to put ideas into words? “You have this flash of insight, then you have to put flesh on it. Days of misery follow – after which, out comes only an approximation of what you originally thought and felt.”

Gornick, who lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village, is a famous walker – her 2015 book The Odd Woman and the City is concerned with both her solitariness and her perambulations – and one of the essays in Approaching Eye Level is also devoted to the unwarranted “tenderness” she finds on the street. (“The impersonal affection of a palm laid against my arm or my back as someone murmurs ‘Excuse me’, and sidles skilfully past my body: it soothes beyond reasonable expectation. I feel such love then, for the idea of the city as well as the reality.”) So how has she found lockdown in her beloved New York? Has it been lonely? “For those like me who live and work alone, the days were pretty much the same,” she says. “But the sense of being isolated once work was over was very strong – and it still is.”

She did not, she says, expect to live through such times: “America feels like a totally different country to me, though I don’t think the decline began, or will end, with Trump. It goes deeper. This has been going on since 9/11. I’ve had 20 years of feeling shaky about being American.” Is she frightened for its democracy? “Every now and then, for a minute. I’m one of those who has always believed that it will hold. Whatever he does, this won’t become a fascist state. This is not a dictatorship. But it does often feel that democracy has been so unbelievably weakened, anything could happen. I think now that for most of my life, without even realising it, I was too light-hearted about being American.” Her tone is ebullient: “Oh, I’m always animated when I make a human connection,” she tells me, delightedly. But her words are sombre, clouded with uncertainty: “The future is up for grabs, and that is a lousy feeling.”

• Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick is published by Daunt Books (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply