“That’s the hardest thing to do—to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.”

For nearly twenty years now Leonard and I have met once a week for a walk, dinner, and a movie, either in his neighborhood or mine. Except for the two hours in the movie, we hardly ever do anything else but talk. One of us is always saying, Let’s get tickets for a play, a concert, a reading, but neither of us ever seems able to ­arrange an evening in advance of the time we are to meet. The fact is, ours is the most satisfying conversation either of us has, and we can’t bear to give it up even for one week. 

Vivian Gornick recounts her shift from polemical journalism to personal nonfiction.

Vivian Gornick on her life as a reader, writer, and rereader.