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Vivian Gornick on In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt

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My First Time

Inspired by our famous Writers at Work interviews, “My First Time” is a series of short videos about how writers got their start. Created by the filmmakers Tom Bean, Casey Brooks, and Luke Poling, each video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria.

This week, Vivian Gornick discusses her first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt, about middle-class Egyptian family life. After reporting overseas, she came home and confronted her material: “When I got home, I had this whole cast of characters, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know how to write a book, it was the first book! … The book taught me who I was. It began to teach me what I was capable of doing and what I would ultimately do, which was to use myself to see the world.” 

Be sure to watch the previous interviews in the series: