Home Free: An Interview with Vivian Gornick
“Every writer, sooner or later, must face the fact that our characters are taken directly from our own lives.”
Vivian Gornick has been writing essays, memoir, and criticism for sixty years, beginning in 1965 when the Village Voice published her response to a controversial speech made by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) at a gathering at the Village Vanguard. The subject of the gathering was “Art and Politics,” and in many ways Gornick has been addressing that same duality in her writing ever since: the art of the novel and the politics of feminism, the art of the self and the politics of the family, the art of love and the politics of hope. She has often returned to the theme of family relationships, including a book of literary criticism, The End of the Novel of Love (1997), and a work of social history, The Romance of American Communism (1977); Fierce Attachments (1987), perhaps her best-known work, is a memoir about being raised in the Bronx by a working-class immigrant mother of Russian Jewish extraction. Her writing for the Review has likewise touched on personal relationships in literature and life, including friends, classmates, husbands, lovers, and fathers in the work of Alfred Hayes, Tess Slesinger, Marina Jarre, Albert Camus, and more.
In the February 26, 2026, issue of the Review, Gornick turns her attention to the relationship between a mother and a daughter in Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, which chronicles Roy’s childhood as the daughter of a well-known political activist in India. I emailed with Gornick to ask her about the challenges of the memoir form, the difficulty of writing about one’s parents, and the relationship between personal and political lives.
Chandler Fritz: You write that “the memoir is rather like a novel in that it depends on dramatized storytelling for its success,” yet you close by noting that even excellent novelists find that “the gift for memoir remains elusive.” What accounts for this discrepancy? Is one’s personal reality somehow resistant to the novelist’s usual tools of dramatization?
Vivian Gornick: Everything depends on the writer’s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional “I.” The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It’s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, “That’s a novel!” But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn’t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.
Two of the memoirs you cite as exemplars of the genre—Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself—dramatize the filial relationship. To this list should be added, of course, Fierce Attachments. What risks must a memoirist take to turn a parent into a strong literary character?
Every writer, sooner or later, must face the fact that our characters are taken directly from our own lives, so there will be friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are going to feel like they’ve been pushed under the bus. There’s no way out of this one. In my own case, I often trembled at what I was doing, writing Fierce Attachments, but then I’d remind myself that my motives were honest, I wasn’t setting out to trash Mama, I just wanted to tell hard truths. I had to believe that that would carry us through. And it did.
Unlike Mary Roy, your mother was still alive when your memoir about her was published. How do you think that affected your task? How do you imagine that distinguished your work from Arundhati Roy’s?
As you say, I was writing this book while Mama was still alive; that alone means I trusted my motives in taking possession of a piece of material I genuinely considered my own. After all, the book wasn’t about Mama, it was about me coming to maturity. Roy’s book, however, is meant to be about her mother; in fact it is mainly about how mean and self-absorbed that mother was. That alone would have made Roy too anxious to write it while she was alive.
In your review you note that Roy’s home state of Kerala “remains as suffocating for [her] today as it was in her childhood.” When you were writing Fierce Attachments, did you revisit the Bronx tenements where you were raised?
In its own way, the Bronx of my childhood was as oppressive to me as Roy’s Kerala was to her—and has remained so. I actually did make a number of trips back to the old neighborhood while I was writing the book, and though there had been many changes, it mainly felt the same: stifling. In this sense, though, usefully evocative.
But the truth of it is the outer boroughs of New York all feel that way to me. When I leave Manhattan it’s always as though I’m going to some depressing neighborhood in a small town…
You’ve called yourself an “urban provincial” before.
By “urban provincial” I simply mean that I am urban—not urbane. Living in one of the most important cities in the world has not made me worldly. I do not feel at home—that is, possessed of a genuine sense of well-being—anywhere except in New York City. That’s rather provincial, wouldn’t you say?
Throughout your career, you’ve written not just about the ideas of radical groups but about the spaces in which people shared their ideas: on walks, at lunches, in campus alcoves and “consciousness raising” groups. What do we lose when radical thinking becomes disseminated across digital networks as opposed to concentrated in a time and place?
I understand the stunning achievement of the digital world, I really do. But the domination of “virtual reality,” especially since the Covid crisis, is an unmitigated disaster. Working at home, shopping online, doing therapy online (!!!), for me this is all a cause for despair. The promise that the digital takeover was going to “connect” us all to one another—what a bad joke that has turned out to be. Many more people feel a thousand times more isolated than ever before with only their iPhones for company…. No, no! Bring back life on the ground! Sometimes I’m glad that I’m as old as I am.
Great interview. I love Fierce Attachments. Such brilliant writing. And I love Mother Mary Comes to Me. Two great writers excavating their lives.