The Odd Woman and the City

Twenty-eight years after her first memoir, Fierce Attachments, The Odd Woman and the City picks up right where Gornick left off. Not so much in story—it's even less chronological than the first book—than in sensibility and style. Like the first, it's a book of walking and talking, but her attachments are not as fierce now. She expects less of them, and she's come to terms—if those are the right words for her acceptance of what she calls her "unholy dissatisfaction"—with her position as an "odd woman": melancholy and unattached but still feeding on the busy, human loneliness of New York. There's wisdom and beauty, each of the kind that's hard-earned over time, on every page of this little book.