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| Vivian Gornick |
Wisdom in the Work
TAKING A LONG LOOK: ESSAYS ON CULTURE, LITERATURE AND FEMINISM IN OUR TIME BY VIVIAN GORNICK. BROOKLYN, NY: VERSO. 304 PAGES. $27.
EMILY GOULD: Can you tell us about the process for making your new collection, Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in Our Time (Verso, $27)? What went into it and what was left behind?
VIVIAN GORNICK: A lot got left behind. I don’t know how any writer puts together this kind of a collection. Someone like Janet Malcolm solves the problem by just putting out book after book of collected writing. I don’t think I’m going to do that.
My devoted editor at Verso, Jessie Kindig, made some suggestions that triggered other suggestions of mine. I didn’t want anything from the old feminist days—she said I had to, so some did get put in—because almost everything I wrote back then reads like ideological rhetoric. Other than that, there were certain pieces that Jessie knocked down and I put back in, most vividly, my review of James Salter’s All That Is (2013) and a piece on Michael J. Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (2009).
