The New Yorker:

The force of low self-esteem can feel so enormous, so unexplainable, it seems almost mythic.

By Vivian Gornick

In the late nineteen-sixties I lived for a year, with my then husband, in the middle of an apple orchard in northern New Mexico, some miles from the glorious Rio Grande Gorge. Our adobe house was equipped with nothing but electricity—no plumbing, no running water—so a fair amount of physical labor was necessary to get through each day. This was fine with me. My husband and I were both in our thirties and, like many of our generation, preoccupied with “finding” ourselves—I by writing something I could think well of, my husband by finishing a dissertation that had long been languishing. But, as I was often gripped by the conviction that any writer ten years my junior was already more accomplished than I’d ever be, I welcomed the time spent hauling water or raking the woodstove.

One day, we paid a visit to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch ten or fifteen miles north of our house. The ranch, long the property of the University of New Mexico, was now run as a writers’ retreat, with a single writer of reputation occupying the privileged position of writer-in-residence. That year, it was Henry Roth, the author of the 1934 masterpiece “Call It Sleep,” a book I held in high regard. When we stepped out of the car, my husband unexpectedly suggested that we look in on Roth.

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