Reading women / Vivian Gornick on the Book That Made Her a Personal Essayist

Vivan Gornick

 

Vivian Gornick on the Book That Made Her a Personal Essayist

As told to Erica Schwiegershausen

September 6, 2017

In Reading Women, the Cut talks to women who interest us about the books by women that transformed the way they think.

The book that influenced me the most in my life as a writer is a small book of essays called The Little Virtues by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. I was quite young, in my late 20s and early 30s, when I read that book, and it taught me who I was as a writer. In the book, there is an essay called “My Vocation.” It’s an account of how Ginzburg came to be a writer. What she’s writing towards, and you’re following right along with her, is the deepening perception of what a piece of writing is: that it has to come from the heart, from the spirit. And she discovers that she is not a fiction writer, but in fact a personal essayist. That’s what she called her vocation — meaning, This is the work I was born to do. She sees that only by being a person who is able to touch the deepest parts of her own self, as a writer, can she experience and practice generosity towards others.

I’ve read these essays over and over as the years have passed. The deepest lesson that I learned was that I was going to become a personal essayist, and that it was as an essayist that I would try to use myself, not to speak about myself, but to explore the world. When you feel that the writer is genuinely on a path of discovery, or self-discovery, the writing comes alive. Ginzburg is insisting that the essay can make you feel the wonderment of being alive as much as you could in a story or a poem. And she does that. It’s my hope that I sometimes do it, too. That’s the claim of the personal essay now, that it has the power to make emotional experience come alive. That’s what we read for, the emotional experience.

THE CUT

Reading women / Mary Karr on the Book That Showed Her the Power of Coldness

Mary Karr

 

Mary Karr on the Book That Showed Her the Power of Coldness

As told to Erica Schwiegershausen

September 1, 2017

In Reading Women, the Cut talks to women who interest us about the books by women that transformed the way they think.

A few years ago Philip Roth loaned me The Lover by Marguerite Duras. It’s a marvel.

She’s this 15-year-old girl with a horrible family in dire financial straits. She takes her small little body and her schoolgirl uniform and buys a sexy fedora, and gets picked up on the road by a wealthy businessman, and this erotic thing ensues. Of course, I read it as a child rape. I mean, she’s 15. She can’t consent. I read it less as a reflection of what the experience was like for that 15-year-old, who must have been fairly cut off and desperate, and more as a kind of erotic indulgence of an older woman in her dotage looking back on being this beautiful young girl, who’s the object of this craven, crazy desire.

It’s so coldly rendered — beyond anything that I as a writer could do. I marvel at the precision of her writing. The cleanness, the power. The baldness. There’s something so ruthless about her gaze. She begins the book [with a man telling her], “I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” This was a woman feeling that, I think, in full force. Yet even in her agony and suffering, the writing is just so bare. I’m struck by the power of that coldness in the world. I’m just not hardwired that way, but I’m interested if there’s anything I can learn from that, as a woman moving through the world, in terms of shielding myself from feeling. You know, repression is a good thing sometimes.

THE CUT