pbA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiographyb pbA contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of bibFierce Attachmentsbi pA memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, iThe Odd Woman and the Cityi explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city New York that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen people on