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Vivian Gornick is one of the most prolific writers in American letters, with eleven books published since 1973. Twenty-eight years ago, she published an unforgettable account of her relationship with her mother called Fierce Attachments, and most recently she's published a memoir The Odd Woman in the City detailing her life as a woman of intelligent discontent. In this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Vivian Gornick discussing voice, adherence to fact, and lucid sentences.

As a memoirist, Gornick is confronted with the question of what happens when a life is committed to the page. Obviously, the work of memoir is not simple replication, but she emphasized the importance of drawing from reality:

"I never said it's okay to make anything up. I said it's okay to compose. When you sit down to write a memoir, you're not writing a transcript or a police blotter. You're not writing a therapeutic confession. You're not doing any of those things. You are composing a piece of experience. There's no doubt that the narrator is the writer herself. That is no doubt. The rest of it is I certainly do believe that everything should originate in reality. Everything should have happened one way or another. But the idea that one transcribes literally what I said, what she said, what he said is really — that's an ignorant reader."

Again delineating between the work of the memoirist and other writers, Gornick noted that voice must be honed differently for writers in these disciplines:

"Every writer under the sun has to find the right tone of voice, not too far, not too close, somehow hitting the right note, not too mythological, certainly not analytical. It's really hard, and you're very gratified when you do find the right tone of voice, and you have to trust it finally and go with it. I've written a lot about this because I'm a nonfiction writer. So every writer under the sun, poets, novelist, everybody needs to find the right tone of voice. The problem for someone like me is I don't have a fictional voice, either as a poet or as a novelist. They find the fictional voice and that gets them through. This kind of writer has only herself, so I have to pull from myself some particular part of myself that will dominate the tone of voice. And that has to be done by understanding better and better and better exactly what the story is that you're telling."

Although Gornick's voice is singular, she, like any other writer, has been influenced by other authors. She singled out Natalia Ginsberg as a writer whose clarity and economy she admires:

"There is a writer actually who has been a great model for me, and that's Natalia Ginsberg. She is an Italian writer who spent her life trying to write a lucid sentence, and she is a writer who began thinking that she was an extravagant Italian writer who was going to write in the D'Anunzio style, great operatic extravagance. And she, after a long apprenticeship of her own, that she put all of this on paper and it's been very moving and useful to me how she discovered how she was a minimalist essentially. And once you discover that, you're in a panic because if you discover that you are on the minimalist side, you need to learn how to use words. You can't waste them. You don't write a sentence that you aren't paying super, super attention to. And I found I loved that."

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