We are all doing our own performances
I'm performing with someone else
The most personal yet most contemporary essay

Vivian Gornick was an American critic and writer who is often compared to Virginia Woolf in terms of opening new horizons in American literature.
His representative work, "Ferocious Attachment" (1987), which he majored in literature at university, was selected by the New York Times as one of the best American memoirs of the past half-century, and won the 2021 Wyndham Campbell Award for Nonfiction.
He has written essays, columns, and literary criticism, mostly of an autobiographical nature, and is especially known for his "Gonic-style memoirs," which obsessively delve into his inner self while providing deep insight into others.
Growing up as a woman in an immigrant family, Gonick recounts her life with her characteristically unflinching honesty and poetic prose.


His writing style vividly captures the dramatic exchange of glances and expressions between himself and others, and the breathtaking atmosphere of a fleeting moment. He goes beyond simple descriptions and primarily uses dialogue, allowing each character's voice and intonation to be felt, showing reality as it is.
We realize that it is only in the suffocating distance embodied by Gonic that ‘I and others’ can finally function as ‘we.’

The book contains seven essays.
The title piece and the very first chapter, “Nobody’s Watching, But Everyone’s Performing,” is set in every corner of New York.
The moment Gonik steps onto the street, a kind of performance begins there.
The street is a stage, and everyone who passes by becomes a protagonist, including Gonik.
Gonik observes the countless people he encounters, listening intently to their stories.
They recall the faces of celebrities or friends from strangers they meet, and when they stop in a place where there is a lot of noise and shouting, they say that the shouts sound like their own voice.
In this way, invisible relationships that are not coincidental but rather intertwined on the street become connected into a single narrative.

I realized that the distance quite often gave birth to works for me, sparkling lights of experience that I would take out and look at again and again in the midst of an endless stream of events.
The distance allows me to do things I couldn't do alone.
In the streets, no one is watching, but everyone is performing.

--- p.11

The people I know are as spread out as the city itself, but they are not all connected.
The people who are my friends are not my friends.
Sometimes, when I feel like my world is expanding and all the people in New York feel like kindred spirits, these friendships feel like loosely connected beads on a necklace.
The beads, each not touching the other, yet all resting lightly yet firmly on the base of my neck, instilling in me a magical, warm sense of connection.

--- p.15

The words they said ring in my ears again, and their faces and gestures come to mind, and I laugh to myself.
I start editing those scenes, adding dialogue here, interpretation there, and commentary somewhere else.
Then I realize that I'm going back in time and imagining them before I met them.
I realize, with a start, that I am writing the story of my day, giving shape and texture to the time that has just passed me by.
The people who passed me by today are now in the room with me.
They became friends, a huge group of friends.
Tonight I want to be with these people, not someone else I know.
They give me back my epic impulse.
It helps me understand the world.
It awakens me to tell stories my life cannot tell.

--- p.46

It is a truth that is too difficult to look straight at, too difficult to face.
And that's why we long for love and community.
Both of those are pretty good things to wish for in life, but they're not things to aspire to.
Longing is like a murderer.
Longing makes us sentimental.
When we become sentimental, we only pursue romance.
For me, what made feminism beautiful was that it made me value hard truths more than romance.
I still pursue the hard truth.

--- p.60

I looked back on my life and realized that I never learned how to live alone.
What I learned was to plan carefully, lie down until the pain passes, avoid it, and just get by.
I wasn't drowning, but I wasn't swimming either.
I was floating in the water, lying down, drifting away from the shore, waiting to be rescued.

--- p.77

After that, I remember twisting myself away from loneliness.
Loneliness terrified me.
I felt like I was losing my balance and falling forward.
As far as I know, balance is everything.
I looked around at the lawns, the buildings, the parking lots, this tiny, tight-knit world where work was paramount.
I remembered that I had learned how to function well in this world (i.e., how to avoid being rude and manage my limits when it came to submission).
There is only one thing I have to do.
It was about looking straight ahead, keeping your mouth shut, and maintaining perfect balance.
I firmly believed that no matter how big life is or what it consists of, life depends on walking the narrow, straight path called the moment.
I turned from my reverie and walked through the kitchen door.

--- pp.102~103

Nonsense, I started telling myself.
Anger was the sea that Loader was floating in, a sea that Loader would never… .
Suddenly the words died inside me.
Familiar thoughts refused to complete themselves.
I realized that I was actually talking about myself.
The story I was telling was always about myself.
I never really knew Loader, nor did I ever see him in his entirety.
I have used him whenever I needed to.

--- p.165

Good conversation depends on a simple but mysterious union of intellect and spirit, a union that is not achieved through effort but rather happens by chance.
It is not a question of common interests, class interests, or shared ideals, but a question of temperament.
Temperament is something that makes you instinctively understand and respond, “I know exactly what you mean,” instead of protesting and asking, “What do you mean?”

--- p.171

Marriage promises intimacy, but if things don't go as planned, the bond can crumble.
The community promises friendship, but if things don't go as planned, participation ends.
The intellectual life promises conversation, but when it doesn't work out, its adherents become eccentric.
Actually, it's really easier to be alone.
Rather than being with someone who arouses desires but doesn't try to solve them.
At such times we are left with a deficiency, which is somehow unbearable.
That lack reminds us, in the worst way, that we are truly alone.
In other words, it stifles our imagination and suffocates our hopes.

--- p.216

The letters are a record of a longing to understand the world, to see through one's own confusion, and to find out what one feels through writing.
It's a different kind of inner pursuit.
In other words, it is a journey to a space that is not on the map.
Transmitting information is a process of sending out a series of connected signals to touch the surface.
On the other hand, telling a story is like carving a path in the middle of a wasteland.
Life requires both.
Either one alone will leave you lacking experience.

--- pp.235~236