Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
It’s the autumn of 1961 and twenty-four-year-old Gail Godwin is in New York City, living temporarily at the Martha Washington Hotel on East Thirtieth Street. She’s waiting for notification from a shipping company that she has a place on the USS Oklahoma, a freighter bound for Copenhagen. After learning about freighters from a book, Godwin made all the arrangements herself and earned money for her passage by waitressing at a resort in the mountains. Using another book, Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, she planned her stay on the Continent. Europe, she believed, was the place that would turn her into a writer.
Godwin remained abroad for five years, living in Copenhagen, the Canary Islands, and finally London where she married a man she’d known for six weeks. For a number of reasons she felt like a failure; the hasty marriage was destined to fail and she hadn’t become a writer. But she would — through talent, pluck and an indefatigable spirit that time hasn’t diminished in the least. Now eighty-eight, Godwin has produced The Art of Becoming a Citizen, which toggles back and forth between recalling her life as a young woman and her feelings and impressions in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. (Full disclosure: Godwin cites some of my political writing from my Substack page, Working-Class Scribbler.) “As I composed my chronicle,” writes Godwin, “moving back and forth in time, I discovered an understory to my history that was new to me.” Godwin is as insightful, sharp and self-deprecating here as she was in her radiant memoir, Getting to Know Death, which appeared in June 2024. The passage of time has done little to diminish the clarity and warmth of Godwin’s prose; reading her is like spending time with a wise and dear friend who will always listen to you, level with you, and tell you how the world works without making you despair.
The woman who was at loose ends at twenty-nine went on to produce sixteen novels, two collections of stories, and several works of nonfiction. She would collect awards and accolades, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. What grounds Gail Godwin is her inherent decency. Toward the end of the book she writes, “One of the blessings of living a long life is that you may live to hear that good fortune has embraced the person or persons you believed you had harmed in the past.”
Even at this late stage in her life, Gail Godwin remains curious about what she can become, about her own agency and capacity for hope, and she shows us what it means to be fully engaged with life.
