Vivian Gornick, writer: "I don't know what would have happened to me without feminism"

Vivian Gornick is experiencing one of those strange phenomena that sometimes occurs in literature and in life: explosive recognition at a late age, especially with Spanish-speaking audiences.

She believes that MeToo and a new sensibility have made young women look to their generation, where they find references such as

(Sixth Floor), a work from the 1990s in which she dismantled the excessive faith that literature put in the couple.

Deeply feminist, this 87-year-old New Yorker scraps the common places of love in her.

We chatted on Zoom.

Question.

Is love as we knew it over?

Reply.

Today it is impossible to make great literature from romantic love.

Before, love was seen as a great metaphor for the human condition in many ways.

Now it is no longer seen or experienced like this, as when there was no divorce and decisions were made from ignorance.

or

can no longer be written today because we all have a lot of experience.

We already know that romantic love is not salvation.

Q.

And do you believe in love as an engine of life?

R.

Love is a great need, it is one of the great ways to feel alive.

But work too.

They are the two great elements that do us good.

As Freud said, life is work and love, and in that order.

Not love and work.

Q.

Has marriage also ended as a model of happiness?

R.

Yes, yes, today everyone gets married knowing that they can get divorced and that ends the sacredness that marriage had.

Q.

How did you experience it?

A.

I grew up in the Bronx, where all the buildings were full of unhappy marriages.

No one dreamed of leaving anyone and women lived in fantasies about what life would have been like if they had found the right man.

That's how I grew up and it's what kicked me out of the marriage.

My mother believed in the idea of ​​great love, but I didn't like her telling me that this was the most important thing.

My father died young and that was an incredible disaster from which no one ever recovered.

I did not want to reproduce the model, I did not find it useful to discover that she was alive, so I always had very mixed feelings.

I never believed in elevating love to such a position of importance.

Q.

And what was your own idea of ​​independence?

R.

I always imagined myself writing, since I was a child.

She was eight years old when a teacher read a piece of mine to the class and said, "This little girl is a writer."

And I believed it [laughs].

Q.

What happened next?

R.

Then I always moved on: small newsrooms, impressions, stories from here and there.

When I was 16, my mother got me a typewriter, so she must have seen something in me.

Then I took writing courses.

And then came feminism, which set me up to become a serious, real, disciplined worker.

Q.

Did feminism help you then?

R.

It made me see that I had been born into a sex that was not taken seriously and that did not take itself seriously either.

I had gotten carried away, married and divorced twice, I didn't even know what I was doing.

Feminism caught on very strongly in New York and promoted many women like me, who were educated and intelligent, but we did not have a goal, a conscience, nobody expected anything from us other than to get married and have children.

I was unhappy with that plan: marriage, children, love, sex, men and such.

I wanted something else.

And when feminism arrived, it explained to us ourselves.

I don't know what would have happened to me if feminism hadn't opened up my world.

Q.

Are today's women taken seriously?

A.

We have made amazing progress in 40 years, but this is a struggle of centuries.

Neither you nor I would be here today if it weren't for the women's movement, but it's never enough.

Spain itself is a great example, but there are so many women who are still beaten by their husbands and cannot think as equals...

Q.

What are today's fantasies?

R.

It is a difficult question, I do not know.

We are in a very fractured time, even for people it is difficult to know who they are, what they want, why or how to fit in.

In another time there were many institutional forces that told you who you were: family, religion... but not anymore.

The young women I meet are full of energy and when they are politically conscious they are very active on women's rights, racism, immigration… Many women are fighting hard for these causes.

But I don't know what they look like inside, I don't know.

When they write novels, they are not love stories, but stories of disconnection, of alienation.

There we are now.

Q.

What do you find in reading?

R.

I find comfort in the long and continuous record of humanity that reading offers me.

The record of experiences makes me feel alive, to see the reasons to act, to find oneself, of all time.

If you read Marco Aurelio, for example, everything is already there, he knew everything and captured it.

And that comforts me a lot.

P.

And write what has given you?

A.

Writing is what makes me feel most alive.

It is so.

When I manage to get something on a page, a single sentence that makes me feel good, I feel happy, I feel alive, safe, nothing can hurt me.

There is nothing like it in the world.

Q.

What do the readers give you?

R.

In the last two years I have received a lot of recognition, affection, good will and that makes me feel good.

The Me Too movement has rediscovered feminists like me.

In Spain, for example, I have become famous [laughs] and that has surprised me.

What I wrote 40 years ago matters today in Spain, people have looked for references in my generation and that speaks of where we all are.

Q.

Is there hope then?

A.

Of course.

Europe is full of young feminists who are fighting, there is a cultural change, one by one.

The Me Too has been key.

But there is still a lot of work to change the sensibilities.

Men and women still treat each other instrumentally, not as partners.

Each thinks the other has something he needs and treats him that way, instead of treating him as a person in his own right.

That is the thing.

Q.

Are you afraid of a definitive reversal in the US, as we are seeing with abortion?

A.

Democracy has deep roots here and the moment a step back against abortion was taken, the next minute, thousands of women and organizations were already fighting across the country.

They won't be able to win.

Democracy is not in danger.

I don `t believe.

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