Olivia: The best cure for loneliness isn't finding your soulmate. It's walking through a crowded city. Today, we're exploring a book that argues the chaotic, anonymous energy of the street is a more reliable companion than any person. Jackson: Hold on. So your advice for feeling lonely is to go get jostled on a packed subway during rush hour? That sounds like my personal nightmare. I’d rather be lonely at home with my cat. Olivia: Exactly! It's completely counter-intuitive, which is why I love it. But that's the core of the book we're diving into today: The Odd Woman and the City by the brilliant Vivian Gornick. Jackson: Vivian Gornick. The name sounds familiar. Olivia: It should. She's a legendary figure from the radical feminist movement of the 70s, a sharp-witted essayist and memoirist. And the title of this book is a direct nod to a 19th-century novel called The Odd Women, about unmarried women forging their own paths. So Gornick is deliberately placing herself in this long lineage of women living outside the norm. Jackson: Okay, so she's proudly embracing being an outsider. That definitely sets the stage. But where does the city, and my subway nightmare, come into all this?

Olivia: It starts with this idea that the city isn't just a backdrop; it's an active character, a companion. And to really get it, Gornick takes us back to 18th-century London, to the great writer Samuel Johnson. Jackson: Samuel Johnson... the guy who wrote the first big English dictionary? What's he got to do with a modern feminist in New York? Olivia: Well, Johnson suffered from crippling depression. He found village life, with its quiet streets and closed doors, unbearable. His cure was to walk the streets of London. And we're not talking about a picturesque stroll. This was 1740s London—filthy, disease-ridden, dangerous. Jackson: Sounds lovely. A real pick-me-up. Olivia: But for him, it was! The sheer chaos and humanity of the street pulled him out of his own head. It reconnected him to life. It’s where he made his most famous declaration: "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." For Johnson, the city made his profound loneliness bearable. Jackson: Huh. So Gornick sees herself in him? A modern-day Johnson walking the streets of New York instead of London, finding solace in the chaos. Olivia: Precisely. She calls herself a flâneuse—a term that traditionally meant a male 'stroller' or 'lounger' of the city streets. She reclaims it. For her, walking the city is a kind of therapy. She grew up in the Bronx, which felt like a village, and from age fourteen, she’d take the subway to Manhattan just to walk for hours, to soak it all in. Jackson: What was she looking for? Olivia: Not necessarily anything specific. It was about the experience itself. She has this incredible line: "I was never less alone than alone in the crowded street." Jackson: That’s a powerful paradox. How does that even work? Olivia: Because she's not just walking; she's observing. She writes about seeing "the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human." The street dramas, the arguments, the small kindnesses, the sheer inventiveness of survival. She feels the "common refusal to go under." That shared, unspoken struggle becomes her company. Jackson: That's a beautiful way to put it. It’s not about talking to people, but about feeling a part of this giant, messy, human project. It reframes people-watching from a passive hobby into something deeply connecting. You're not just a spectator; you're bearing witness. Olivia: Exactly. She tells this one quick story about being distracted and stepping off a curb into the path of a truck. A man grabs her, pulls her back, and for a second they just stare at each other. No words. Then they walk away. She realizes the experience was more profound for him, the rescuer. She says, "It is he who has felt the urgency of life—he is still holding it in his hands." Jackson: Wow. That’s a whole movie in a ten-second interaction. The city is just constantly serving up these moments of profound, anonymous intimacy. Olivia: Yes! And that’s the magic she finds. It’s not the planned, curated connection of a dinner party. It’s the raw, unexpected, humanizing flash of connection on a crowded sidewalk. It’s a connection that asks nothing of you but to be present.

Jackson: Okay, that idea of connection through shared struggle feels like a really important thread. Does she apply that to her personal relationships, too? Olivia: Oh, absolutely. And that feeling of connection through shared struggle is the perfect bridge to her view on friendship, which is just as radical as her view on cities. She finds her deepest connection not in shared happiness, but in what she calls the "politics of damage." Jackson: The 'politics of damage.' That sounds... intense. And maybe a little grim. Olivia: It is. The centerpiece of the book is her twenty-year friendship with a man named Leonard. He’s gay, she’s the 'Odd Woman,' and she says, "We share the politics of damage... An impassioned sense of having been born into preordained social inequity burns brightly in each of us." Their main subject is what she calls "the unlived life." Jackson: The unlived life? The things they wish they'd done? Olivia: More like the parts of themselves they feel they were never allowed to live out because of the world they were born into. They meet once a week, and their conversations are built on this shared sense of grievance, this mutual understanding of life's difficulties. When she asks him how his life feels, he gives this devastatingly perfect answer: "Like a chicken bone stuck in my craw. I can’t swallow it and I can’t cough it up." Jackson: Okay, I have to be honest, that sounds incredibly draining. A friendship based on being negative? Why would anyone want that? I can see why some readers find the book a bit bleak or self-important. Olivia: And that's the brilliant part! It's not about being negative for negativity's sake. It's about radical honesty. Gornick explains it perfectly: "The self-image each of us projects to the other is the one that makes us feel coherent." In a world that demands positivity, their shared worldview, however grim, validates their internal reality. It's a profound form of being seen for who you actually are, not who you're pretending to be. Jackson: So it's like finding the one other person who speaks your secret, grumpy language. It makes you feel less crazy. Olivia: Exactly. And she contrasts this deep, if difficult, connection with her romantic failures. She was married twice, briefly. She had passionate affairs, like one with a man named Manny Rader. The physical connection was intense, but their conversations would always devolve into arguments. She felt her mind was a "burden" to him. Jackson: The classic "great chemistry, terrible communication" problem. Olivia: A very deep version of it. She came to a painful conclusion: "To be loved sexually is to be loved not for one’s actual self but for one’s ability to arouse desire in the other." She realized that while Manny desired her, he didn't love her 'actual self'—her thoughts, her spirit. She felt an "invisible membrane" had fallen between them, one that desire could pass through, but "human fellowship" could not. Jackson: Wow. So the friendship with Leonard, built on 'damage,' was actually more real and sustaining than the romantic love built on passion. That completely flips the script on what we think of as a 'healthy' relationship. Olivia: It does. She even tells the tragic story of the writers Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson. They had this incredible intellectual friendship, but he was terrified of her deep depression. He couldn't handle her 'damage.' He avoided her when she needed him most, and she ultimately committed suicide. Gornick concludes that neither of them was "equal to the task of friendship" because they couldn't face the messy, difficult reality of each other's inner lives. Jackson: So for Gornick, true intimacy isn't about avoiding the darkness in each other. It's about being willing to meet each other there. Olivia: That's the heart of it. It's a challenging idea, but it feels profoundly true.

Jackson: So when you put it all together, the city and the friendships... it seems like Gornick is building a life on her own terms, finding connection in the most unconventional places. She's not waiting for a savior or a soulmate. Olivia: Exactly. She's not looking for the fairy tale. In fact, she has this amazing reinterpretation of 'The Princess and the Pea.' She says the princess wasn't really after the prince; she was after the pea. Jackson: She was after the thing causing her discomfort? Olivia: Yes! Gornick writes, "That moment when she feels the pea beneath the twenty mattresses, that is her moment of definition... the unholy dissatisfaction that will keep life permanently at bay." For some people, that irritation is the thing that makes them feel alive. Gornick is embracing the pea. Jackson: She's choosing to feel the difficult thing rather than numb it out. And the city, with all its raw, unfiltered humanity, is the one place that doesn't ask her to pretend the pea isn't there. The city is full of peas! Olivia: The city is nothing but peas! And that leads to her ultimate insight, which she learns from watching an actor named John Dylan. He'd had a stroke and was aphasic, his speech was broken. But he decided to perform a monologue from the bleak writer Samuel Beckett. Jackson: That sounds incredibly difficult. Olivia: It was. His voice was unsteady, it cracked, it rushed. But he didn't fight it. He went with the brokenness, making it part of the performance. His struggle to speak became the physical embodiment of Beckett's text about the struggle to exist. And he delivers the final lines in a strangled whisper: "What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required." Jackson: That gives me chills. It’s about accepting the brokenness—in yourself, in your friends, in the city—and realizing that just being present in it, just breathing through it, is enough. It's the ultimate acceptance. Olivia: It is. The posture is immaterial. The performance doesn't have to be perfect. The friendship doesn't have to be all sunshine. The life doesn't have to be a fairy tale. You just have to be in the world. It's such a powerful message, and it makes you look at your own friendships and even your own city differently. We'd love to hear from our listeners—what's a moment where you felt deeply connected to a stranger or a place? Share your stories with the Aibrary community. Jackson: And it leaves me with a question to ponder: Are we building our connections on shared joys and curated perfection, or on the deeper, messier, shared understanding of our 'damage'? Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.