Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Thank you for including The Soul Grown Refined in your summer issue. Along with the many engaging oppositions in Vivian Gornick’s discourse on friendship is this: “‘she endorsed the middle class, I loathed the middle class.” Would someone please remind this wonderful writer, my former MFA teacher, that hating the middle class faded into history around the time avocado green and golden harvest colors faded away from our kitchen appliances, roughly forty years ago. The huge recent changes in capital and income concentration are turning the middle class into a thing of the past.

That quibble aside, Gornick continues with admirable precision to chart her own toughness as a warning to readers—“she dreaded loneliness, I endured it.” Unwilling to bend toward the amiable, intolerant of the commonplace, Gornick is not a typical guide to friendship, but her insights make her review of the books under discussion all the more riveting.