Within the recently reborn twenty-first-century socialist movement, Vivian Gornick’s 1977 book The Romance of American Communism has attained a kind of cult status. The long-out-of-print book, composed of interviews with former Communist Party USA members active during its mid-century heyday about their time in the party and what it meant to them, was passed around via poorly scanned PDFs and beat-up old discarded library copies bought for pennies on Amazon (until the price for a used copy was driven up to over $100).

Whether the left publisher Verso decided to reissue the book in paperback with a new foreword from Gornick because the deep insights into leftist activism contained within its pages were too profound to remain out of print, or because they recognized a smart market opportunity in which demand was far outstripping supply, we’re grateful that Romance is gaining a second life. Jacobin has published several reviews of and a podcast about the book, and our editors have written about it elsewhere.

Gornick herself, however, in the intro for the new edition and in this interview conducted by Alex Doherty, isn’t quite as keen on the book as many of us at Jacobin are. But her reflections on what led her to write the book in the first place more than four decades ago, and why she “wouldn’t have written that book today” but is “not sorry I did write it,” are worth reading and wrestling with.