Vivian Gornick

The critic and memoirist Vivian Gornick, born in the Bronx, began her career in 1969 as a staff writer for the Village Voice, where she was assigned to cover the feminist movement. Her first memoir, Fierce Attachments, about growing up in a “building full of women” in the Bronx and her fraught relationship with her mother, was published in 1987. “I’m really proud of all the young women who do so much,” she said in a 2021 interview. “It really thrills me that whenever anything happens that’s violently sexist, in ten minutes the whole world of the internet lights up. Thousands of wonderfully intelligent young women throwing in their two cents. I feel mother to it all, grandmother, but I do like that a lot.”