The last event I went to before New York City shut down was a talk by Vivian Gornick at The Strand, the famed East Village bookstore. She was discussing her most recent book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, a collection of essays revisiting the work of authors who have shaped her thinking and writing. Since then, I’ve been rereading her: her memoirs Fierce Attachments and The Odd Girl in the City, which revolve around walks and discussions around New York City, and, most recently, The Romance of American Communism, an oral history of American Communist Party (CP) members, originally written in 1977 and reissued this year from Verso, with a short new preface by Gornick where she rereads herself.

Appropriately enough, the original Romance was already a kind of rereading, a reconsideration of the world Gornick had been born into — where, as one Communist she interviewed fondly remembered, “the right-wingers were the New Dealers, and the political conjuration went on from there, Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Anarchists.” Gornick was moved to reconsider them in light of her experiences as a chronicler of (and participant in) the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, attending to the ways that coming to politics might feel, as her title suggested, something like falling in love.

As Gornick opens the book, she recalls that when she “converted” to radical feminism while covering the movement as a journalist, she felt the joy of discovery and insight that so many American Communists felt when they first found the party or read Marx: the joy of comradeship and the joy of knowing that the injustices one has witnessed and experienced are not inevitable. As one party member, born into terrible poverty in Poland and working in a Chicago slaughterhouse when a coworker introduced him to socialism put it, “I didn’t even know that I was thinking there’s no way out of this life for me until suddenly I was thinking there is a way out.” For women of Gornick’s generation, who had been told their position in life was not only fixed but a question of nature, the epiphany would be just as startling.