This series of essays reads like wonderful short stories, each about a writer's life and work, as it hones in on the central insight that compelled each one. While its final thesis may prematurely sound the death knell of the genre, it is gently and intelligently argued, and every page is full of insight and delight, conveyed in compact, amusing, speedy sentences. Great beach reading.

The essays in this small book on literature, women, and writing are short and simply written, and yet full of the excitement of thought and the importance of literature to our psyches. Gornick made me want (and plan) to read or re-read the books she talks about.

This is simply one of the best books of essays I've encountered in years. Thank you, Vivian Gornick.

After finishing Gornick's excellent book, I could not help feeling something grating against my sensibilities. The analysis was flawless, the insight superb, even profound. I spent several hours working the thing through my skull and writing things down to put in order what it was that made me uneasy with Gornick's final proclamation that love (romantic, traditional marriage, etc.) no longer serves as a viable metaphor for the making of literature. And even then, after hours of this, I still could not put my finger on it. Reading the Kirkus Review, I found myself even further perplexed. Kirkus says: "Her governing idea is this: Love, sexual fulfillment, and marriage are now exhausted as the metaphorical expressions of success and happiness." Herein lies, I think, part of the problem: I have no trouble agreeing with Gornick that romantic love, marriage, and sexual fulfillment hold little or no true source of success and happiness in and of themselves, both in our time and, I would say, in any time. In this sense, they no longer serve us well as "metaphors" of happiness, as Kirkus notes. However, this is not the extent of Gornick's conclusion, and a somewhat misleading way of describing it. Kirkus fails to continue on to the final idea that not only are these things (romantic love, marriage, sexual fulfillment) not viable metaphors for success and happiness in our lives--they are no longer viable metaphors for the creation of literature as well. In this, I find myself disagreeing with Gornick. In my mind, this is akin to declaring ANY subject an unviable metaphor for the creation of literature. Are we to cease writing of marriage and romantic love simply because the rules have changed and the meanings of these things have shifted with cultural and societal changes? I think the very fact that this marvelous book exists--a book of powerful, insightful literature dealing with our perception and understanding of romantic love, marriage, etc. (both real and literary)--threatens to undermine its whole premise. With dazzling skill and analysis, Gornick proves (perhaps despite herself) that there IS something left to say about love, and that great literature can still arise from an examination of love, and from the metaphor of love. Her love affair with words, her love affair with love, with literature--we see it, we feel it, even if Gornick makes the choice to ignore it and allow the intellectual discourse to play itself out to its solid, logical, somewhat "cold" conlusion (love as mere "necessity?" Eating, sleeping, defecating--these are necessity; surely love is something more than simple necessity...). In the end, Gornick's style, form, language, insight--these become the elements of that great, constant love affair which will always define and drive and sustain literature: the love affair between author and audience.

Vivian Gornick writes beautifully, whether she's writing about love, politics, or the craft of writing. The Situation and the Story is based on her many years of teaching creative writing and focuses on ways of making nonfiction personal without wallowing in self-absorption. In other words, it helps writers discover where the 'universal truth,' the essence of Story, is in the millions of anecdotes in our lives.
As an author and writing teacher, I've found this book invaluable and have read it several times. My copy is well thumbed and appropriately coffee-stained.

Vivian Gornick invariably delights me, whether in her memoir, Fierce Attachments, her occasional essays in various journals, her book about reading, or this new one, which gave me a lot to think about.
The Situation and the Story focuses on essay and memoir-writing. Rather than trying to cover a lot of ground superficially, Gornick lays out one main idea and explores it in depth, using a wide variety of examples to illustrate her ideas. It was particularly helpful to have long excerpts from these examples, so I could really get a sense of the essay or memoir being discussed. She deals most intelligently with the question of the narrator -- the narrator's "persona" on the page, and the relationship of the narrator to her/his material.
As someone who writes and teaches memoir, I found this extremely helpful, but it will be equally interesting to anyone who writes or reads narrative nonfiction and wants to think seriously about it.
It is a great relief to find a book about writing that has gracefully sidestepped every pitfall of the advice genre. Gornick's style is respectful: she expects her readers to be as serious and smart about literature as she is herself and, even if we're not, we can always find a lot to think about in her work.

The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick is immensely entertaining while adapting an educational prose designed to enhance awareness of "self" as narrator. She uses excellent examples of non-fiction narratives that serve to further the invitation of speculation through tone, syntax, and perspective. The self as a persona is developed using wonderful writers such as Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, and Edmond Gosse.

Vivian Gornick breaks down the writing barrier and gets right to the contents of human emotion. We are what we write, and our personal truths are conveyed in our words. She does a fabulous job taking a stand against the "boring, agitated" self and replaces that with the truth speaker who can move an essay forward creatively and effectively. Non-fiction can instruct without losing the personal voice.

For anyone who likes to write, this book is the first step to question your narrative self and begin to discover the wonderful implications that "self" can bring to your writing. I highly recommend this book.

This book was one of the many fine works of literature we needed for 11th grade at my school. While reading it I was engrossed and couldn't put it down. A really, really good book.

This is one of the most important feminist texts ever written. It's also, along with Mary Daly's "Beyond God the Father," one of the most neglected and underrated. Dinnerstein's influence, however, is far greater than the fame of this witty and intelligent but verbose and academic book: More than any one person, she's behind the idea of "Mr. Mom's," men who insist on equal involvement with women in the care of children.

Dinnerstein subverts the nuclear family like Daly subverts Christianity: Both writers expose the ugly misogyny at the core of old, venerable institutions. Dinnerstein was right to say the nuclear family of the mid-century was patriarchal and sexist. She is even right about the explanation for this, namely, that men are so humiliatingly indebted to women (who as mothers are their "first love, first witness, and first boss") that they grow up and say in effect "OK, now it's women's turn to feel inferior."

This is Dinnerstein's blazing truth: Women need to share their god-like maternal power, their be-all and end-all status in the eyes of helpless infants, toddlers, and children, if they are to escape the mutinous resentment this creates, resentment which later leads to adult male sexism.

But here is her glaring error: She assumes that as parents men and women play identical roles, that they raise children in a similar rather than complementary way. I think her ideas are like communism: good on paper but virtually unworkable in real life. Yes, many men since Dinnerstein wrote "The Mermaid and the Minotaur" in 1975 have taken a greater role in child-rearing (feeding, diapering, and singing lullabies) but usually they become their wives' junior partner rather than a coequal. This is because women for aeons have been slow-cooking the patience, compassion, and multi-tasking that parenting the very young requires. Men cannot just decide they're as skilled with babies and children as women are overnight, as a current film like Eddie Murphy's "Daddy Day Care" (2003) makes explicitly and hilariously plain.

I suspect that men have a different role in raising the young, one which ascends in importance as the mother's wanes. Masculinity, which has also been slow-cooking for aeons, is better suited than "sit still" femininity to an antsy, exploratory, risk-taking, lustful, transgressive lifestage called adolescence. It is here where men can make the best contribution to "child"-rearing, such as the mentoring of teen boys, which the Men's Movement has plaintively called for in the last 20 years.

Dinnerstein was right about one thing: Men and women deserve equal weight in the lives of the young. But since men and women are very different, even the opposite in some ways, we can expect their roles to be very different, even the opposite in some ways. Some of the best "fathers" I know exist outside of nuclear families, which tend anyway to turn adult males into bullies or eunuchs (or some strange combination of the two). These men are teachers, counselors, or simply "friends to the young." Their unfettered masculinity is a source of pride to themselves and excitement to their "sons" and "daughters."

If I don't agree with the conclusions of "The Mermaid and the Minotaur," why the solid 4-star review? Because this book is fiercely intelligent. Because it does the surprising, fusing Freud with feminism. Because of its unique organization: central text plus sidebars which develop certain thoughts further. Because it's a learned scientific text which is unafraid to call on the power of poetry. Because, except for her misplaced faith in a mass and permanent conversion to androgyny, Dinnerstein had it right: We need fathers.

I read this book twenty years ago when I was in college. I found (and still find) Dinnerstein's feminist argument for shared parenting to be one of those books that has the potential to change lives. She employs a variety of intellectual resources to make the case for a feminist social criticism that focuses on the dynamics of the nuclear family as the source of many, if not most, social problems. Her re-interpretation of Freud's work, and of the neo-Freudians who have moved beyond him (particularly Marcuse and Norman O. Brown) is sometimes difficult reading, but can with careful attention be followed even by those who have not waded through the original texts.

This is a book that combines crystalline prose and incisive rational argument with passion and emotion. She argues for nothing less than a radical restructuring of the human family, and of the social/economic relationships that undergird family life. The kernel of her argument is that so long as we all are raised (exclusively or predominantly) by our mothers or by female caregivers, children will grow up with a deep-seated resentment of the feminine (since no parent can perfectly anticipate a child's needs, and all children, in growing up, will be conditioned by our infantile rage at our parent's imperfections).

There's much more to it than this. I've read dozens of self-help and pop psychology books (think of Deborah Tannen and John Gray) which try to explain why males and females are the way they are; I've never read an analysis which goes as deeply as this one into a powerful and persuasive explanation of the role of sexuality in the formation of human character. If you read this book and pay attention, you will experience multiple shocks of recognition; you will suddenly understand your self and your relationships with the opposite sex in a new light; and you may even be persuaded to change the way you live your life and raise your children.

At the age of twenty, I was persuaded by Dinnerstein to be (when I did have kids) an active and equal participant in the raising of my children, from changing diapers to feeding and everything else. I was so convinced of the importance of her analysis, and of its potential to change lives, that I have, in the past few decades, bought and given away as gifts eighty-eight copies to male and female friends. (I figured that if I just told people what a great book it was, few would follow up, but that if I actually bought it and thrust it into their hands, they might be moved to actually read it.) I'm not sure how many of these were actually read by the recipients. But I can report that out of 88 copies given away, eight people came to me afterward and said something to the effect of, "This book changed my life." I think that's not a bad rate of return, especially when you consider that many people probably never got around to looking at it, or never had the patience to follow the argument through to the end.

One bit of advice: Dinnerstein frequently interrupts herself to continue lines of thought in footnotes, endnotes, and boxes which focus on various controversies, reviews of other authors, and parenthetical developments of the whole structure of her argument. It is worth your while to read this book through, if not on the first go-round, then at least once, in exactly the sequence she sets forth: that is, when you see a footnote, or a note saying "See Box F for further development of this point," stop the linear reading and follow her through all the eddies in the current of thought.

The book is a masterpiece of social criticism; a classic of feminist analysis; an important addition to the literature of psychoanalysis which rescues Freud for feminism; and a book that can change forever the way you view yourself, your relations with your partner, and your children.

I'm older and wiser now, and it remains to be seen how my children will benefit from growing up with a dad who changed their diapers, cooked for them, and took too long getting up in the middle of the night to attend to their needs. But I am convinced that this book is one of a handful which, if read and assimilated by everyone, would make the world a better place.

I'd second the reviews below. Dinnerstein also relates the fear of death to how women rule the infant's world and men the adult's world. Seem unrelated? Phrase "womb to tomb" captures it best perhaps.

I did not find her hard reading at all and I delighted in her sardonic humor, but another book that talks about similar issues, and in really nice prose, is Lillian B. Rubin's "Intimate Strangers: Men and Women Together." In a footnote of that, I discovered Dinnerstein. Anyway, I've never met anyone else who's read Dinnerstein--though I've pestered others to read it--so I'd be very glad to get email: snowden666@yahoo.com (for a character in Catch-22, but a lot of other people had the same idea).

in the review below.

It still doesn't look right! Oh the perils of relying on spell check!

Vivian Gornick's book is filled with anecdotal incidents that culminate in a montage like telling of the relationship between herself and her mother. At times, I longed for a more linear style, or a more indepth telling of some of the stories. The end of the book, when Gormick goes into greater detail on her relationships with men in her life, was the part I enjoyed the most. I thought those retellings revealed more about her character than any of the other vignettes. I closed the book still wanting more on the mother daughter relationship, I felt like there were chunks missing. In some ways it was difficult for me to match up the mother Gornick watched as a child, and the mother she went walking with later in life.

The truth is, Gornick could write about the hard bit of cheese left over and I would thill to it. She is a superb stylist and I've read all her books greedily -- precious objects that they are. This book, with its dark and painful attachment to her mother laid bare for us -- and how this attachment has acted upon all her other attempts at attachment -- is kinetic both intellectually and emotionally. She repeatedly tiptoes up to that taboo -- the lack of love that keeps a mother and daughter so intimately entwined -- and lets us stare over the lip of the abyss. I see myself, I see so many women. She is an incredible writer. Every hard won word is worth the wait. A true gem.

Vivian Gornick lived with an Egyptian physicist for six months in Cambridge, Mass. They broke up but she kept wondering what made him the way he was. She decided to go to Egypt to see his family and try to understand that small fraction of Egyptian society (upper class) that they represented. She went with a contract to write a book. If you think you can imagine a Jewish woman going to Cairo in 1971 and living with an Arab family, forget it. You can't. This is a very sensitive, intelligent book which brings to the fore the basic humanity of one Vivian Gornick, whoever she may be. (Seems she has written a lot of books, judging from the entries here, but I've never heard of her except for this book.) Perhaps Ms. Gornick never finds Ali Mahmoud, but she certainly gives a very close-up picture of his family and friends, exaggerating neither faults nor virtues. Perhaps Ms. Gornick never found Ali Mahmoud, but she did find herself. While the description of the whole process can get a bit gossipy at times, in the end the book is deeply worthwhile as that rare kind of book in which the author openly reveals her own mistakes, flaws, and anger along with the portraits of the others, the foreign 'subjects', thus making herself part of the story rather than just an "unseen observer"--detached and uninvolved. Though the title resembles many others--books by Americans who wandered here and there around the world--few, if any, are so shatteringly honest about what happened to them in the societies they visited. This person really was IN Egypt, not just getting her photo taken riding a camel by the pyramids. Certain stylistic tendencies may rub you the wrong way, but you can't fail to be fascinated by her experience.

Still trying to validate the paper it's printed on. The only thing I liked about the book was the design of the pages. Found the essays not especially well written and am looking forward to discussing it with our book review group to see if they can actually shed some light on the issues. Guess I wasn't lonely enough to want to crawl up with this book....it made me fall asleep.

Like a sympathetic, merciful glance from your best friend, this book was a quick, potent, and important read. Gornick's intelligent essays are marked by the odd brand of effortlessness born only by writing that penetrates. And, as far as being a book about lonliness (among other themes), I found myself feeling particularly unlonely -- even connected (with lord knows what though...Gornick? myself?) -- after putting this down. If you're on the fence, buy it now.

This book really connected with me. Gornick is a great storyteller and a thoughful observer. She has a fabulous style of writing. It is clear, but so deep. She writes the most amazing insights about ordinary life. It is eloquent, insightful, but not overly academic like I usually expect books of essays to be. I love reading memoirs that reveal a lot about the author's world. If you like the genre, don't pass up this book.