At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New York

by Adam Gopnik

A vivid memoir that captures the energy, ambition and romance of New York in the 1980s from the beloved New Yorker Canadian writer, to stand alongside his bestselling Paris to the Moon and Through the Children's Gate.

When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha Parker, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young and the arty and ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Stranger's Gate builds a portrait of this moment in New York through the story of their journey--from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Gopnik transports us to their tiny basement room on the Upper East Side--the smallest apartment in Manhattan--and later to SoHo, where he captures a unicorn: an affordable New York loft. Between tender, laugh-out-loud reminiscences, including affectionate portraits of New York luminaries from Richard Avedon to Robert Hughes and Jeff Koons, Gopnik takes us into the corridors of Conde Nast, the galleries of MoMA and many places between to illuminate the fascinating world capital of creativity and aspiration that is New York, then and now.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, New York, Biography, Essays, Biography Memoir, Autobiography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 5, 2017

About the author

Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist, renowned for his extensive contributions to The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1986. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal, he earned a BA in art history from McGill University and pursued graduate work at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Gopnik began his career as the magazine’s art critic before becoming its Paris correspondent in 1995. His dispatches from France were later collected in Paris to the Moon (2000), a bestseller that marked his emergence as a major voice in literary nonfiction.
He is the author of numerous books exploring topics from parenting and urban life to liberalism and food culture, including Through the Children's Gate, The Table Comes First, Angels and Ages, A Thousand Small Sanities, and The Real Work. Gopnik’s children’s fiction includes The King in the Window and The Steps Across the Water. He also delivered the 50th Massey Lectures in 2011, which became the basis for Winter: Five Windows on the Season.
Since 2015, Gopnik has expanded into musical theatre, writing lyrics and libretti for works such as The Most Beautiful Room in New York and the oratorio Sentences. He is a frequent media commentator, with appearances on BBC Radio 4 and Charlie Rose, and has received several National Magazine Awards and a George Polk Award. Gopnik lives in New York with his wife and their two children. He remains an influential cultural commentator known for his wit, insight, and elegant prose.

Reviews

[J. · Rating 1 out of 5]

My own natural ambit, I discovered eventually, was somewhere where the two manners met, in a kind of aphoristic prose, filled with neat epigrams, placed on the page like shiny ribbons on a present--funny in parts and touching in others, with a few passionate political views trailing along behind.

There is a convention in successful memoirs and autobiographies, which is that no matter what the anecdote, make certain not to be the hero of your own story. The story that is already, yes, all about you. The classic methodology is self-disparaging humor, but even that can be worn thin, as is the case here. The self-disparagement here, dutifully tacked on to every stylish outburst of personal heroism or incident of stylish derring-do-- is always well worked, conspicuously woven into the proceedings. Too often not to be the case, our humble narrator is very concerned with letting you know he is --quite stylishly, perhaps-- very funny to himself, really, and not at all a brag or a barstool gloat.

I looked forward to this book because as a one-time novice New Yorker myself, I thought I might recognize things. There is always some similarity and common empathy about being ridiculously young and ambitious in a ridiculously enormous city. As it was, I had also moved to New York City circa the turn of the Eighties, and found myself in a downtown loft by the middle of that decade. I lived about a dozen blocks south of where Gopnik centers his tale, he in Soho, and I in Tribeca. Surely there would be common points of --- yeah, no; forget that. Gopnik seemed to be one of those downtown bohemians of the era who wouldn't be at all opposed to a (stylish) pair of white suede shoes, a rather cheeky haute-couture sport coat, and a trashy pair of Canal Street slacks, just to set it all off. The line between working artist (or yes, writer) and arty gallivanteur --seems to have been drawn, at any given moment, at where Gopnik stood. A gallery lurker, and a gossip. He was writing the Talk Of The Town column in the New Yorker, for chrissakes.

Fair enough. All the same, let's get one thing out of the way here. Gopnik is an Unapologetic, Uncontrollable Aphorist. All writing starts and finishes with aphorisms, he seems to think, and privately doesn't mind a bit of aphorizing in the middle parts. Everything, everywhere, is really a dressed-up something-something to Gopnik, because all writers are only doing what writers do. Circular, ain't it, Mr. Gopnik? Well no, because all circularity is actually-- Ok. Right, got it.

I tagged maybe a dozen pages in this either because of a) their unrelenting aphorism carpet bombing or b) the thought that it would be worth discussing or disagreeing about them in any eventual review. Turns out I can't be bothered. I'm not at all intrigued by the possibility of reliving the moments and twisty turny contemplations of Mr G.

At random, here's the sort of thing he does. A whole lot of :
There are conversion experiences, saints fall off horses, but de-conversion is rarely an epiphany. Bringing the horse back to the secular stable happens at a walk. Faith arrives at a gallop, but it leaves on tiptoe.

Okey dokey, Mr G.
In a folk-rock lyric from the early seventies, this kind of thing was sort of au courant and worked, after a fashion. In a glib, desultory magazine column, you might even get that one in there, perhaps dripping with sarcasm. In a memoir where your patient reader still has over a hundred pages to go … no, I really think perhaps not.

Flights of art criticism, name-dropping, urban planning and that suede-shoe-&-tat Annie Hall aesthetic of the era, the "very model of urbanity" as he puts it... Whether and how, modern art may be as valid as, say, High Christianity, as exampled by the Mass. And the comforting, cozy if tawdry acceptance of the burgeoning Artworld Market of the day, as okay-by-the-foregoing-association. It takes a village, says Gopnik; no, a medieval Cathedral Village. Go, sin no more, and get a receipt from my friend, Jeff Koons. Say hello to Avedon. Blithely spun equivalences, blinding flashes of self-regard, near-invisible self-disparagement edits--- what more can you ask for..?
____________________
as if on speed dial, the answers to nearly all of Gopnik's quandries:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...

[Brody Coronelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love memoirs centered around NYC, but this one completely failed to engage me. Gopnik’s voice gets lost in lengthy tangents, and the true aim of the book- to capture the splendor of living in New York as a young person during a period of urban/cultural transition- is lost in a fit of unnecessary details and dry commentary.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished listening to Adam Gopnik read his tender and nostalgic memoir of his young adult years in New York with his wife, Martha. I was very taken with his story, as we are roughly the same age and arrived in the city at nearly the same time, Gopnik in fall, 1980 and me in early 1979. Gopnik is a native of Philadelphia, as am I, though his family relocated to Montreal sometime during his formative years. He has done a wonderful job of capturing 1980s New York life as it was for the young, ambitious, artistic and broke.

The couple first lived in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, about 50 blocks due north of where I lived in Murray Hill/Kip's Bay. I spent many hours in their neighborhood, which he lovingly describes as it was in those days, full of German and Middle European restaurants... the Ideal, the Kleine Konditorei, to mention just two of the best-known, small shops including second-hand and thrift stores, and many older people who were beginning to die off. Rents there and in my own far-East neighborhood were still low.

Gopnik and his wife had no money and first lived in a tiny room, but they made their ways and their marks. Gopnik ultimately became a writer for the New Yorker, an aspiration of many, achieved by very, very few and Martha worked as a film editor. Along the way, they moved to a not-very-glamorous Soho loft (before that neighborhood became the province of the very rich), and met a number of well-known artists, writers and others (I did not share this accomplishment with them, I'm sorry to say).

I love Gopnik's stories about the tenor of the city, the people he met, and the work he did before and during his time at the New Yorker. There is a deep, but sweet-flavored well of nostalgia here for a city that has ceased to exist as he and I knew it, and it was wonderful to drink it up and make a visit to those lost places.

I recommend this book for all New Yorkers past and present (and anyone who loves the city), especially those of a certain age, who knew the city as it was when we were young.

[Marianne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to stop reading this. It was self-indulgent, show offy excuse for a book. The over use of clever metaphors (ugh) and fascinating vocabulary (ugh) made for cumbersome writing to say the least. But most of all, why does he think we care about his blue suit, his cockroaches and he and his wife eating Hagen Das ice cream. I'm at a loss as to why this was considered a good book except maybe because of what he has done in the past? Narcissism at it's best.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A prime example for the maxim (is it a maxim?) that not everything by your favourite authors is worth reading. This was not a book for me. It is steeped in art history and New York in the eighties and art history and oh my god it even has a tortuous novella on SoHo tucked in halfway through. Which isn't to say that this isn't a good book. It is. But it's good for other people. The style is naturally great -- I'd even venture to call its the purest distillation of Gopnikian Overdrive yet published. But where in the past I've always loved his aggressive, crowded apostrophizing -- his asides have asides, choruses for a chorus -- it feels strained in this collection because I just didn't *get* its subject. A beautiful writer tackling a time, a subject, a space for which I have no frame of reference.

[Bookish]

I’ve always liked Adam Gopnik’s writing in The New Yorker. And I think I’ll always be a sucker for coming-to-New-York memoirs. I arrived in 1995, from Milwaukee. Gopnik arrived the previous decade, from Montreal. His was a pre-Internet era, and one where a certain real estate tycoon, now U.S. president, stepped onto the stage. New York in the eighties was the epicenter of the global art world, and Gopnik, who came to NYC as an art history grad student, got to know this world, and key players, personally: photographer Richard Avedon, critic Robert Hughes, sculptor/installationist Jeff Koons. At the Strangers’ Gate resurrects the city in a decade when gritty punk ethos and ultra-rich bombast coexisted, defining what came to mind when people thought of “The Big Apple.” —Phil (https://www.bookish.com/articles/staf...)

[Squirrel Circus · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, I like the way this guy writes...about certain things. That is why it gets three stars - am I not supposed to dock stars for not liking the topic? Or feeling misled, rather? Too bad.

This book starts and ends in what I wanted to read about...he and his wife’s arrival, life, life changes in New York. It visits this well of a fantastic, engaging theme a few times in the middle too.

BUT, most of the book is about the ART WORLD of the 80s and 90s. I won’t even try to through some lingo around, because I’ll use it all wrong. I recognize some names, but it’s just not my thing. This author wrote for the New Yorker, Talk of the Town, which I love. But he also wrote a LOT of art criticism and art history, which I DON’T.

So don’t let the cover art and first couple chapters fool you.

[Jake · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Paris to the Moon, and thought I’d equally love this, seeing as I’ve lived in New York City and I generally enjoy Adam Gopnik’s writing. But this book was insanely difficult to read. It consisted of 2 or
3 humorous stories, a lot of humble bragging and name dropping, and a 150 page chapter about art that only those name dropped or referred to would find interesting. This book completely lost me.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gopnik is one of the best writers alive, in the limited sense that his prose is unerring and musical, that he can make any subject interesting for twenty minutes. But this book, about being young, poor, and dizzily romantic in 80s New York, is too thin, 90% style. I don't resent reading about him and his wife hanging around department stores, nor even the long passage praising his wife, but I also don't take away anything beyond the mouthfeel of his words.

In some sense their impractical romanticism - spending their last savings on one fancy suit, appreciating graffiti, lingering around Bloomingdale's not buying anything - was straightforwardly aspirational and material. Not bohemian, or, temporarily, on the way up, merely waiting to become an aesthete and, glory of glories, a tastemaker. This is the great tension of arty people, particularly if (as the Gopniks do not) you have pretensions to moral superiority: really you are rejecting one consumerism for another. Book people get away with this most, because the sensuality and pleasure of great writing is hidden between the covers. One solution is to get into high-status trash (you can't be accused of narrow sensualism for liking Tracey Emin or Billy Childish); far more common is to contort yourself so that liking and buying art is a moral action, if not a cleaner and more beautifully non-instrumental kind of moral action than merely doing something for someone.

It’s human nature to turn a mouth taste into a moral taste—to make a question of how something feels in your mouth into a question of what it says about your world. That’s the basis of every dietary law. When we imagine God, we don’t imagine him indifferent to appetite. No, we imagine him enraged and enraptured by what we’re eating—he tastes bacon and declares it bad and tastes matzo and can hear a whole heroic history when he breaks it. Every mouth taste instantly becomes a moral taste. And so when we need to fight—and no marriage can survive without some useful friction—we fight about food...

The restaurants of New York enraptured me—we didn’t go to any, but I loved the idea of them. I would lie in bed, after we unrolled and enwrapped the “triple fold” sofa every night, and read what was then the premier guide to New York dining out, Seymour Britchky’s The Restaurants of New York... It’s a vanished tone now, in the age of mass amateur reviews on Open Spoon or Table Talk or whatever the current forum is called. (“I took my honey here for birthday dinner, and—wow!—what a blowout. Five stars, for sure.”)

At the time, though, his criticism... seemed thrilling in the power of its sneering, the certitude of its exclusions. The power critic of this kind depends on the lightning turns of his contempt and his favour: no one should ever be sure where he would land, or on whom.

Note the smooth way in which a cool irreverent idea - "It’s human nature to turn a mouth taste into a moral taste" - becomes a certain precept "Every mouth taste instantly becomes a moral taste" just by lightness and repetition. This is the downside of being this good at prose: you can make things sound simpler than they are.

The humour is ever-present but vanishingly slight. When he loses his only pair of suit trousers, he devotes five pages to a comic lament for them. But it's the echo of comedy.

I've never recovered them. Because the truth is that what we learn in New York is that a piece of plywood will never protect you from the wild, and that and that suit trousers, once lost, are lost forever. The city makes you the opposite of the emperor with the new clothes. He walked around unclothed, and everyone noticed but him. In New York, you walk around naked from the waist down for decades, and nobody knows but you.

There are still three or four wonderful points, the best of the New Yorker's shallow profundity

The idea of the cash machine, which now seems either self-evident or dated, seemed exciting then. Cautiously withdrawing thirty-five dollars at a time from our tiny fund, and doing it first at the Chase machine on Third Avenue but soon at cash machines all over town... we came into a different daily relation to money than our parents had done. My grandparents had belonged to a check-cashing generation, proud to be engaged in it. To have an institution as large as an American bank in effect endorse their signature on a little bit of paper as equivalent to money meant to be taken seriously as a citizen. My parents, in turn, were credit card cultists – they loved having them, signing them, showing them, using them. For those who came of age in the boom times after the Second World War, the whole notion of credit, of sharing in a limitless improving future – of being trusted to buy now and pay later, since later would be so much richer than now – had some of the same significance that the notion of being trusted with checks had for my grandparents.

We, in turn, generationally, had regressed, I realized back into a cash economy – we used checks just to pay the utilities. The machines were one more instrument of that infantilization; we went to the machines for something that felt, at least, like our allowance.

[Ruxandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

My kind of book, the one that mixes humour with stories of life and the art scene, the most beautiful cities in the world (New York and Paris). If I could invite anyone for dinner and I'd know what to TL about that's barely interesting, Gopnik would be my choice. His wife will be someone I'll never forget, with her beauty and habit of sleeping days on end, her Nordic heritage. Also I'll never forget what his father told Gopnik when he left homely Montreal for New York:

Never underestimate the insecurity of the other person.

How many times must I have told my friends the story about walking "naked from the waist down" through New York. And me losing a dear hat just while reading this in a team and rejoicing, only to cry afterwards. I always gather my friends' stories of dear Items lost, with this. Plus, Gopnik was good friends with one of the genius photographers of our era: Richard Avedon. He was like a father to him.

Gopnik sounds a lot like Sedaris, by the way.

I'm writing this from Genève Airport.

[Tessana Michele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hm. This book was alright, I liked the ongoing imagery of the blue room as well as Gopnik’s interactions with eccentric artists.
I guess, I felt Gopnik didn’t tackle subjects that seemed to matter to me. At times this book felt materialistic.
The highlight of the book, for me, was reading about Gopnik’s dedication to his wife. He is a very good writer and used lovely imagery; I guess I found this book rather boring, oops?
Maybe I’m wrong about this book, but it didn’t do much for me despite its aesthetic appeal.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a "coming to New York" memoir set in the 1980s. Gopnik hobnobbed with NYC's cultural elite of the time and there is a lot of name-dropping in the book which seemed to put some people off. I really enjoyed it though - made it feel gossipy to me. I listened to this book on audio, which is narrated by the author.

[Angela Paolantonio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great to be transported back to the streets, apartments and myths and legends of the then, still liveable NYC circa the 1980s

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book about a very interesting life. He paints New York City in such a beautiful , albeit at times gritty light. That was New York in the 80s!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once a biography and a snapshot of New York City in the eighties and nineties. Adam Gopnik describes his arrival with his new wife and how they managed in a tiny room and then moved to Soho, before it became unaffordable. He's a wonderful writer with a wry sense of humor.

[June · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it’s because I started reading this book very shortly after having finished an excellent, exciting, and informative text, but I found it very hard to gel with this book. Indeed, after reading half of it, I decided to flick through the rest very rapidly.

Its initial premise was good: an account of Gopnik and his wife’s re-location from Montreal to New York, and the extent to which the Big Apple didn’t match their expectations. Through comical narrative, the author recollects their move to their tiny flat, so small that he writes, ‘I don’t have any mental image of Martha from those years, except as a kind of Cubist painting, noses and eyes and ears’. He then writes about his failed attempts at cooking, his disastrous employment in a library, his rather more enjoyable job at MoMA (during which he describes paintings to tourists), and his perplexing career of fashion copyeditor at ‘Gentlemen’s Quarterly’ magazine (despite having no fashion sense himself). I’m afraid that by this point I was struggling to keep on reading, and so I effectively gave up. The language was conversational, modern – though not slangy – and easy to read, but I think my issue with it is that it lacked substance. I wanted to learn something from the book, rather than a series of humorous tales about failed jobs and cooking. Maybe the rest of the book had something to offer in this line, but I didn’t have the urge to find out. Many people will no doubt disagree with me; to be honest, I think I would enjoy this book more by reading it again. I think, in my situation, it was let down due to a reading hangover enforced on me by the book I had just finished - which isn't fair to the author. For entertainment and comic value, it rates highly, though. 2.5 stars (rounded up to 3) from me.

[Joanna Katz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the beginning and end that described being in love with his wife. He had some refreshing insights about married life. I was disappointed by the book overall, though, after being charmed by Paris to the Moon years ago. I definitely recommend skipping from page 90 to about 150. The midsection about the 80's Soho art scene is tedious, convoluted and off putting. If this guy if such a hot shot art historian, why does he have to keep showing off critical chops to people who wanted to read a memoir. He can't help being a name dropper, striver, ...not charming at all.

He sets up the whole book defending being sentimental about his young romantic ideas and bohemian days. I decided to go along on this doting journey because his wife came across as intriguing and winning so I couldn't fault him for rhapsodizing about her and their dreamy and comic love life. But later on, he seems just as sentimental and indulgent about his professional reputation.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 stars.

[Livia Manera · Rating 4 out of 5]

C’era una volta una città dei sogni che si chiamava Manhattan. In quella città – o meglio in quell’isola tutta protesa verso un cielo di smalto – ambizione, energia e successo erano una formula che ancora funzionava. “A metà degli anni Ottanta”, ricorda Adam Gopnik, “i nostri amici erano giovani romanzieri e artisti, i loro libri erano pubblicati, i loro quadri appesi, le loro quotazioni salivano, e i rialzi aumentavano; e benché quelli intelligenti tra loro sapessero che eravamo aggrappati con le unghie a una sporgenza d’un centimetro su una parete che si stava sgretolando – la facciata d’un edificio già condannato e in via di demolizione – nondimeno il panorama che si godeva da lassù, per il momento, era bellissimo”.
In quella capitale dell’ambizione che Gopnik, grande firma del New Yorker, descrive così bene, due ventenni provinciali potevano arrivare con quattro soldi in tasca e una chitarra, e nel giro di pochi anni trovare angeli custodi come Richard Avedon, guadagnare incarichi prestigiosi, e veleggiare verso il privilegio, la fama e l’autorevolezza, senza mai conoscere uno smacco professionale, una crisi coniugale, nemmeno un collassetto emotivo, che quello, si sa, non lo si nega a nessuno.
Ecco dunque la materia di Io, lei, Manhattan, il memoir di Adam Gopnik che è per metà commedia romantica – i suoi primi dieci anni d’amore con la documentarista Martha Parker, collo di cigno, erotismo vivace, compagna ideale di un uomo che tutta la vita ha cercato l’eleganza nella forma e nel pensiero – e per metà ritratto di una Manhattan dove “un giorno servivi antipasti a un cocktail, e qualche mese dopo Gordon Lish ti faceva un contratto per pubblicare una raccolta di racconti con Knopf”. E dove, e dove, meraviglia delle meraviglie, le riviste erano centrali alla cultura.
Martha e Adam approdano nel 1980 a un seminterrato di nove metri quadri nell’Upper East Side, lei iscritta alla Columbia e lui dottorando in storia dell’arte con due ambizioni: una che rimarrà frustrata, scrivere canzoni per Art Garfunkel, e una realizzata, pubblicare piccoli pezzi di costume sul New Yorker. In due parole: “Pane amore e fantasia” in salsa newyorkese, con quel miscuglio cioè di ansia, ambizione e desiderio, che negli anni Ottanta era il combustibile della vita, e oggi è più spesso motivo di delusione (vedi Girls di Lena Dunham).
Fatto salvo il coraggio di Gopnik di affrontare un argomento tabù come l’Amore Coniugale, le pagine migliori di questo libro di intrattenimento alto (splendidamente tradotto da Isabella C. Blum) sono quelle del trasferimento della coppia da uno scantinato dell’Ottantaseiesima strada infestato dagli scarafaggi a un arioso loft di Soho infestato dai topi, nel 1983. E lì, che festa ragazzi: artisti, scrittori, eccentrici veri. Per non parlare del cameratismo degli ambienti bohémien che nei locali della Soho pre-shopping mall, affratellava chi serviva a chi era servito. Anche se Gopnik, con una punta di dandismo, non resiste a far notare che “In un’era di cocaina e punk, noi eravamo champagne e Gershwin”.
Le pagine di Gopnik sulla Soho degli anni Ottanta non sono soltanto le più brillanti del suo nono libro, ma anche le più intellettualmente elaborate: pagine che in uno stile levigato ci ricordano come quella cittadella dell’arte dalle facciate di ghisa e i montacarichi al posto di ascensori, sia il luogo dove si è compiuto un passaggio cruciale. Mentre la politica di Reagan sdoganava l’avidità più spudorata, anche gli artisti subivano una mutazione. Non tutti apprezzavano: “’Cattive’ motivazioni come l’ego e la libido erano accettabili. L’ambizione no”. Nella Soho delle gallerie di Mary Boone e Leo Castelli “L’espressionista che vendeva i suoi quadri perché doveva farlo è un eroe; il neo-espressionista che vende i suoi quadri perché gli va di farlo non lo è”. Tradotto: i Donald Judd e i Richard Serra della vecchia guardia mantengono la loro aura di purezza a dispetto del successo materiale; i Julian Schnabel e i Jeff Koons che non fanno mistero di ambire al denaro, la bella vita e le belle case come tutti gli altri, incluso il loro acerrimo critico Robert Hughes, sono (fortunatissimi) criceti che girano sulla ruota.
Messa da parte la chitarra e persa la guerra contro scarafaggi e topi, l’avventura del protagonista si chiude con la promessa esaudita di una vita di scrittura piena di soddisfazioni, e con la scoperta che scrivere porta con sé l’inconveniente della solitudine. Ma difficilmente s’incontrerà un autore per il quale zavorra sia stata più leggera.
Come dice Gopnik, con uno dei suoi felici giri di parole: “Gli scrittori sono condannati alle loro frasi, il che a volte li rende liberi”. Una rara dichiarazione di felicità, per uno scrittore, che fa luce su qualcosa di ancora più raro, proprio come la felicità vera.

[Sheri-lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was hard to categorize. 3? 4? True to Gopnik form, there are wonderful parts and I doubt anyone can walk away from the bits about Martha without feeling the warmth and tenderness of their relationship (and what we all kind of hope to find in our own relationships). I'm not smart enough or well versed enough in art to follow the (admitted by Gopnik) digression about art. I was glad for his return to his topic of Martha. I am thankful to have read this after having traveled to New York and spent time absorbing what I could at the MET and MoMA. This book reminds me however much I felt like I learned or saw or experienced in the art world is so very little. Sigh.

Some little moments I want to copy here, just for my memory.

"My theory about marriages and fighting is that -- well, everyone knows Tolstoy's thing about how all happy families are alike and how unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. My theory is that all unhappy marriages have many different quarrels in them, while all happy marriages have the same quarrel, over and over again.
And that is how you know you have a happy marriage -- that there's one quarrel that two people have from the day they're married to the day they die. It's not that they don't have a quarrel, it's not that that quarrel is not, on its own terms, often quite violent. It's just always the same -- so that the couple come to know all the steps and the dance of that particular quarrel. It becomes their ritualized steam valve, their anger dance, their shake-a-spear moment."

Yes, I get it. Every once in a while I need to shake my spear.

"This mix of awkward and elegant was, I suppose, the essence of his charm, for charm is always simply courtesy offered spontaneously, the gracious thing offered as though it were the obvious one. (Cary Grant is the most charming of actors because his wit is always offered as aplomb, simple and self-evident, imperturbable in the face of every incident.)
So I witnessed that night a love of art, and a hatred of pretense, and I sensed another quality I could not yet quite name but was intuiting, and that I would later think of as 'aristocratic,' although he was a Jewish kid whose father was a haberdasher. Its essence was an adaptation of manners to the moment for the emotional ease of those involved -- a readiness to let oneself look silly in pursuit of a social occasion, a knowledge that the spontaneous adjustment of self to circumstances was what the good life meant. Middle-class people knew the rules, aristocratic ones grasp the spirit of generosity the rules had been meant to codify - they broke them in order to restore their true purpose."

"And, then, the gift of charm is the gift of instant intimacy."

I think Gopnik is a charming writer in that he offers the gift of intimacy to his readers and that is what makes his writing so gracious and endearing.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Gopnik is a year older than my parents and came to New York right around the same time they did, which made this book feel very personal for me despite the cavernous difference between their experiences. My parents were young lawyers and lived in Brooklyn, my mother working for the district attorney as a criminal prosecutor, which is also a book I would love to read, although she will never write it.

Adam Gopnik and his wife, Martha Parker, lived in Manhattan and the world of art - mentored by Richard Avedon, working at the Frick, writing for GQ and the New Yorker. I've long been a fan of Gopnik's writing, but I struggled to get through his earlier books, Paris to the Moon and Through the Children's Gate. This book is shorter, which helps, although it still manages to be a bit repetitive in places. I enjoyed it very much, and found his musings on both art and marriage interesting.

New York City thinks it's the center of the universe, a view that Gopnik and my father both seem to have accepted wholeheartedly. I have come close to living in New York as an adult more than once, but I never quite have and now I doubt I ever will. I'm skeptical of New York - or maybe I'd only like to be skeptical, and really I've drunk the Kool-Aid just like my father before me. Had I found my way there I would have had yet another very different experience, of course, but one thing that struck me about Gopnik's life there in the 80s is how similar it seems, in some ways, to the Millenial experience. Just like Millenials, people my parents' age - in New York, anyway - lived in tiny, squalid spaces and never expected to own their own homes. Gopnik writes about how they pursued small luxuries like Haagen Dazs because true economic stability was forever out of reach. The previous generation took all the apartments and never left. Now the superrich are probably using them as investment properties or Airbnbs.

I like reading about happy marriages because I'd like to believe they are possible, and Gopnik and his wife certainly seem to have achieved that rare goal. Martha is almost more of a motif than a character in this book - I think Richard Avedon has more actual dialogue. Did she successfully pursue work of her own, or, as Gopnik hints at one point, did she simply slide into a supportive role for others? I'm not sure. She seems like an interesting person - a real-life Holly Sturgis - and I would have liked to know more about her. Seems like Gopnik loves her a lot though. That much is very clear.

[Alessandro Fasanaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Agli inizi degli anni Ottanta, una giovane coppia si trasferisce dal Canada a New York (USA) per iniziare una nuova vita. Non sono particolarmente abbienti, il loro amore e la loro intraprendenza trasformano un buco di appartamento in un luogo magico, il più misero dei lavori in un’opportunità, ogni stradina, ogni locale nello scenario di incontri e avventure. Da mille esperienze, spesso deludenti, più spesso divertenti, i due impareranno a comprendere meglio sé stessi e ad amare la multiformità della vita incarnata dalla città che li ospita.

È la storia che decide di raccontare Adam Gopnik, critico d’arte, collaboratore col New Yorker da lunghissima data, in generale scrittore multiforme, del tipo che all’estero è più in voga che da noi. Al suo attivo narrativa, saggistica – persino su cucina e storia -, recensioni, diari di viaggio e parecchia autobiografia. Le storie raccolte e rielaborate in ‘Io, lei e Manhattan‘ sono state già pubblicate in passato e insieme compongono una sorta di deposito finale di un’esperienza di vita che si vuole degna di essere tramandata.

Bisogna dire che di norma le autobiografie sono noiose, ma una dote affabulatoria permette a certe persone di trarre racconti divertenti anche da una spesa al supermercato. Gopnik è uno di loro: la sua storia di giovane senz’arte né parte, il quale per sbarcare il lunario si barcamena in lavori fra loro diversi, coltivando interessi culturali e cercando di conciliare piacere e dovere, diventa un piccolo romanzo di formazione – forse piacevole anche perché finito, tutto sommato, bene. Incontri con personalità di rilievo e non, aneddoti e riflessioni sulla società e sull’arte si mescolano a un vero e proprio ritratto della Grande Mela, capace di avvincere soprattutto per l’entusiasmo con cui è realizzato.

Sia chiaro: non è alta letteratura. Né, del resto, Gopnik non dà mai l’impressione di essere un vero e proprio intellettuale. È un viveur attento al costume, la sua scrittura è patinata come le riviste per cui ha scritto per anni, intrattiene senza ulteriori pretese e forse pure consapevolmente. Si parlerebbe di un libro memorabile, se solo ce ne si ricordasse una volta concluso il giro di giostra.

“La mattina in cui dovevo sposarmi, a New York, entrai in una libreria: lo facevo sempre nei momenti di crisi o di estasi, finché non le hanno chiuse tutte – e allora, come un monaco, mi è toccato cercare un po’ di conforto o di ispirazione da qualche parte nell’etere”

[Daniel Warriner · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Adam Gopnik's At the Strangers' Gate (2018) isn't irritating and inaccessible in its verbosity, it's highly entertaining and insightful. He mixes into the memoir just enough self-deprecation—as in the bare minimum—to keep his writing from sounding pretentious. Describing himself as "a naturally garrulous stylist," he meanders through and over and around and under all kinds of topics, with a focus on New York City in the 80s, his wife, Martha, the art scene, his journey to becoming a confident, well-known writer and, I suppose, urban pests as well if you consider how frequently cockroaches and rats creep in. (There were little well-organized German cockroaches; and there were the Asian cockroaches as well, busy and enterprising. And there were those enormous American cockroaches, then called water bugs, who resembled wasps displaced from their natural habitat.)

The book must be interesting to different readers in different ways. Anybody who was part of the NYC scene back then wouldn't have to do as much guesswork reading it; knowing the people and places, they'd get a lot more out of it. For me, I read closest the parts where he reflects on becoming a writer for GQ and The New Yorker, and what being a writer means to him (in the epilogue he remarks: "We write in order not to have passed by in vain.") His accounts of the art world were interesting too, and felt as if they'd been thought out deeply by the expert that he is—he seems far more sure of himself on this topic than others, like sex. The parts where he goes on about his relationship with Martha, and their everyday routine, was a bit dull in places. The 80s in New York are commonly portrayed as one giant party, but if it was anything like that, Gopnik must not have been invited. It's sweet, though, his uxoriousness. And the couple worked hard together to get to where they got to, success. Gopnik tells us: "I was writing, and it was all I did, all day long and most of the night." And this at the end of that period is his great achievement, the destination of his ambition. In a review by Craig Taylor in The Guardian, he describes Gopnik's writing as, "sentences [that] build into paragraphs that are architectural feats." And they really are, and are reason enough to read this book, and to be challenged (or befuddled) by it, and unquestionably would improve anyone's crossword performance.

[Rebecca Wilkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like Adam Gopnik and read most everything he writes. This is at least his sixth book that I have read and of course the articles in The New Yorker. I saw him on TV last year and something he said made me wonder if he was having marriage problems which was somehow disappointing, like David Brooks and Christopher Kimbal taking on new spouses in their 50's and 60's. But this book cancelled those ideas as he seems to be very much still in love with Martha. He does explore some of what being long-married is like, although he says that people don't want to hear about it either because of jealousy or boredom. "Marriage when "desire becomes duty." "There was more static in the signal" regarding love over time. He is a keen observer of life and times and I was able to watch on You-Tube his chat with Charlie Rose in the weeks following 911. It is still one of the best interviews of that time. This book had a lot about modern art which I found boring. He also seemed to name-drop throughout. I suppose since they were 2 kids from Canada who came to NY in 1980 and actually made a success, the names he drops are people in their social world and yes it might be more boring to read about their friends John and Jane Doe. I got some interesting quotes out of it but mostly like he says of Martha, I could have slept through it.

[Fran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand why people don't like this book. Gopnik does seem to go off on tangents, but I find the tangents interesting. I remember NYC in the 80's and he's captured it so well. He seems to do a lot of "name dropping" but those were the people who made NY the city it was at that point in time. And he knew them. Many of them were artists because he was an art student. His descriptions of the Blue Room which was 9 X 11 and was in fact his entire living space are reminiscent of many first apartments,especially if you lived in NY and had little money. They moved up in the world by moving down to Soho and a sunny loft in a landmark building with reasonable rent, shared with mice, rats, the occasional mystery liquid dripping from the ceiling, the odd neighbors. The story of how they lucked into this abode made me laugh out loud. At the time Soho was still a village with loading docks, lumberyards, and hardware with a ship's chandler on the ground floor. And his stories about Richard Avedon were hilarious ~ little did Shirley and Michelle from the heartland know they were being photographed by one of the great photographers of our time.
How can you not like a book, or an author who dedicates his work : "This one is only for Martha: First, last,love, life, ever, always, awake or (quite often in this book) asleep." She was the prettiest girl he'd ever seen.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Gopnik is an utterly delightful writer, on subjects from mundane to sublime. This memoir of his early life in NYC, with his equally young wife, beguiles with the classic tales of young folks new to the city - the teensy apartment, the first job, the next job, the roaches!

Sprinkled throughout the stories of how he and Martha adopt and adapt to their new home are lessons on how he learned about art and artists and fashion and writing and food and so much more. He seems to meet just about everyone. Richard Avedon, famed photographer, starts to calls him every morning; soon, they're spending weekends with him in Montauk. He befriends critics and painters and dealers and foodies and a charming lady who rents them an enormous SoHo loft.

At various points, he digresses to really delve into these lessons - in art theory, the structure of the commercial art market, how monthly fashion magazines work, the joy of marital fidelity (and sex). Some diversions run a wee bit long, but he's such an erudite and entertaining writer, you stick with him.

The timetable of events is occasionally a bit smudgy; just how long did he work for GQ? But like all great storytellers, he's such good company that these pesky details rarely matter. Enjoy the tale, for it is beautifully told.

[David Newton · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s hard to know where to fall with Adam Gopnik. One page I’m saying OK...I’m going to get into his writing but next two pages...probably not. He seems to at least be somewhat self aware of his faults but still one to keep on trucking in showcasing them. A humorous but a bit questionable story of forgetting or —perhaps they called the wrong person 24 hours before a keynote address —section is typical as is the story of losing the pants off the hanger to his first nice suit purchased in NYC while walking home with them and then frantically backtracking to search for them is another —how ideally constructed a scene— that might well have happened but did Adam subconsciously tip the hanger a bit to let them fall off so he would have a story to tell over and over again (which he admits to telling over and over again) and finally to make it into a book and also the full circle summation at the end? His writing kind of puts those questions in your head. The self indulgent writing still contains some nice stories of the city in the 80s but did I feel satisfied with the read? Not really, because I wanted him to be more real, less constructed. I guess it’s a problem for New Yorker writers making books that once were articles. For a less cringe worthy memoir of a period in NYC, read Patti Smith’s Just Kids if you have not already.

[Marco Palagi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un soliloquio dell’autore sull'arte. Per un centinaio di pagine è monologo pregno di nomi di artisti dei quali manco conosci il nome e non sai se cercarli su Google o saltarli a piè pari e aspettare che prima o poi arrivi qualche pagina di reale narrazione.
Va preso atto che è una via di mezzo tra un memoir e un saggio. Non bisogna lasciarsi ingannare dal titolo. Non è un romanzo. È un libro perfetto per un appassionato d’arte.
La “lei” del titolo, la “lei” della copertina inganna il lettore che si aspetta semplicemente una donna, un’amante del narratore. Ma la “lei” non è Martha, la compagna di vita di Adam Gopnik, ma l'Arte in tutte le sue forme. Anche se sono certo che l’autore intendesse riferirsi a sua moglie.
Manhattan è fuori dalla finestra, è la vetrina spalancata sull’arte, è il quarto personaggio (se condideriamo anche Martha) che si manifesta in tutta la sua bellezza anni ‘80.
Un libro faticoso, quando si perde a filosofeggiare sull’arte, ma per chi ama New York e la conosce e l’ha vissuta anche solo un pochino, ti fa venire solo voglia di cercare una stanza di nove metri quadri sull’Ottantasettesima Est.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book slowly, savouring each essay. Gopnik's memoir is dedicated to his wife Martha "first, last, love, life, ever, always, awake, or (quite often in this book) asleep". It depicts life in NYC in the 1980's of two young, very bright people. Gopnik worked at the MOMA, the Frik, GQ and finally at the New Yorker during this time. Many of his essays caused me to laugh out loud even days later: the story of his lost pants, the incident with his friend Richard Alvedon and the "button man", and the evening of the flood in Gopnik's SOHO apartment. His chapter on the craft of writing is stellar. The only reason I did nt give it five stars is that the discussion of art history is a little lengthy, although I did learn a lot. Also, I could have done with just a little less detail on the various infestations by NYC rodents.

I am sure I will reread At the Strangers' Gate, as I did Paris to the Moon, for there are so many essential truths here. Bur for now, I will move on to one of the few Gopnik books I have not read yet.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this! While some of the art theory was a little above my head, other parts made me laugh out loud. Gopnik's descriptions of his and his wife's early years in New York is exactly what I'd imagine living in New York to be like, of what it takes to live there. I appreciated that he maintained an awareness of the absurdity of the art market, those involved in it, and the lives of the extremely wealthy, all while living proximal to these things.

Gopnik's style can take a little getting used to. As such, I had greater success with this collection on the days I dedicated a full hour to reading it, which allowed me to get into its rhythm. At times, I also felt he could have used a better editor, and I didn't feel his metaphors always worked. But his observations could also be striking, and I particularly appreciated his words on aesthetics and beauty, and their connection to one's values.

Although he was a writer for The New Yorker for years, this was my first encounter with his writing, and I'm intrigued enough to try seeking out his "Talk of the Town" column.