Free The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick

on the cell phone howls.
    â€œYes,” I say, “call the police.”
    The bus grinds to a halt.
    â€œEverybody off the bus,” the driver calls out.
    A woman in the back wails, “I’m late for my therapist!”
    When the cops show up, they laugh at me.
    I go home, write up the incident, and e-mail it to the Times .
    Two days later, my phone rings and a man from the paper says, “You want us to publish this ?”
    *   *   *
    She was born Mary Britton Miller in New London, Connecticut, in 1883, into a wealthy Protestant family and grew up to become one of the Odd Women. Who can say why. Her childhood was marked by humdrum melodrama—by the age of three she’d been orphaned, at fourteen her twin sister drowned, by eighteen (it’s been speculated) she might have borne an illegitimate baby. What, however, can actually account for a sensibility destined to be shaped by one set of experiences rather than another; or, for that matter, explain why one set of events rather than another becomes experience. What is certain, however, is that inevitably one ends up deeply surprised—“This is not what I had in mind!”—at how it has all turned out; and just as inevitably, the surprise becomes one’s raw material.
    Whatever the truth of her inner circumstance, in 1911, at the age of twenty-eight, Mary Miller settled in New York City, where she worked and lived, quite alone, for the rest of her long life. When she died in 1975, it was in the Greenwich Village apartment she had occupied for more than forty years. She was never married, and she seems not to have had a lover anyone ever knew. What she did have was friends, some of whom described her as witty and mean, entertainingly haughty, and impressively self-educated.
    For years, Mary B. Miller wrote conventional poems and stories that got published but went unnoticed. Then, between 1946 and 1952, between the ages of sixty-three and sixty-nine, under the name of Isabel Bolton, she produced three short modernist novels that, at the time of publication, earned her a significant amount of literary attention. Edmund Wilson praised her work in The New Yorker , as did Diana Trilling in The Nation . Both critics thought they had discovered a major new talent.
    These novels are all voice, hardly any plot at all. The reader is inside the mind of a woman—essentially it’s the same woman in all the books—going through a day (or a few days) in New York, musing, thinking, reminiscing, trying to puzzle out her life in prose that mimics interiority: free, flashing, reverie-bound. The action is always at a remove; it is the reverie that counts. In the first novel the year is 1939, the woman is in her forties, and she’s named Millicent. In the second it’s 1945, she’s in her fifties and named Hilly. In the third it’s 1950, she’s in her eighties, and she’s Margaret. A life dotted with smart, knowing New Yorkers is sketched in, characters are scattered about, and always there is a young man to whom the protagonist is oddly attached; but really she is alone, and has been alone forever. In each story, however, the woman is able to cut a deal with life because she has the city to love. And how she loves it:
    What a strange, what a fantastic city … there was something here that one experienced nowhere else on earth. Something one loved intensely. What was it? Crossing the streets—standing on the street corners with the crowds: what was it that induced this special climate of the nerves … a peculiar sense of intimacy, friendliness, being here with all these people and in this strange place … They touched your heart with tenderness and you felt yourself a part of the real flight and flutter—searching their faces, speculating about their dooms and destinies.
    This relation between the self and the city is Bolton’s true subject, the modernist part of her