Eyeing loneliness.

"Approaching Eye Level," is written by Vivian Gornick. Part memoir, part profile, part cultural reporting, "Approaching Eye Level," takes the search for connection through the hungers and desires of youth, romantic love, marital estrangement, the virtual family of early feminism, failures to communicate in academics, chance encounters with pedestrian philosophers on city streets, the unique satisfactions of letter-writing and the deepest dreads of the solo self. Gornick's essays meditate on solitude, isolation and loneliness and tracking her insistent yearnings for both independence and connection through the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of living alone.