Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 18 May
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Working as a journalist at New York subculture bible Village Voice in the 1970s, Vivian Gornick honed her skills as an essayist and made her name as a feminist polemicist. But it was a groundbreaking, book-length work of literary memoir, Fierce Attachments, that cemented her reputation as a giant of personal narrative writing. The book, published in 1987, isan extreme close-up account of her own relationship with her mother.
In the years since the publication of that classic literary memoir, Gornick has continued to explore the possibilities of personal narrative and non-fiction through biography, literary criticism and essays. In her latest book, The Odd Woman and the City, she traverses the streets of New York City, reflecting – with her usual humour and unflinching lucidity – on friendship, literature, family and the single life.
A living legend of narrative non-fiction, Gornick visits Melbourne to discuss her intertwined life and work.
Featuring
Vivian Gornick
Vivian Gornick is the author of the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, a biography of Emma Goldman, and three essay collections, two of which, The Men in My Life and The End of the Novel of Love, were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Jordy Silverstein
Jordy is a historian and writer. She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn Books, 2015), co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016), and has been published in New Matilda, Overland and the Conversation.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne, researching a history of Australian government policy towards child refugees as part of the ARC Laureate Research Fellowship 'Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism from 1920 to the present'. Her other research projects have examined histories of modern Jewish identity, sexuality and collective memory.