Vivian Gornick

#2

2001

"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.". "How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the reliable narrator who will tell the story that needs to be told? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks, and answers. Using some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Vivian Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, and Oscar Wilde.". "This book, which grew out of fifteen years of teaching in M.F.A. programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own."--BOOK JACKET.

#3

For general readers, Gornick, a memoirist, essayist, and critic, draws from interviews with about 100 women to describe their experiences as scientists and the contributions they made to biology, chemistry, physics, physiology, experimental psychology, and other sciences, addressing issues of discrimination and stereotypes along the way. Updated to include recent developments, this revised edition has been published on the 25th anniversary of the book's first publication and as part of the Women Writing Science Project of the National Science Foundation.