Insightful, sharp and self-deprecating... The passage of time has done little to diminish the clarity and warmth of Godwin's prose; reading her is like spending time with a wise and dear friend who will always listen to you, level with you, and tell you how the world works without making you despair... Even at this late stage in her life, Gail Godwin remains curious about what she can become, about her own agency and capacity for hope, and she shows us what it means to be fully engaged with life.

California Review of Books

Written with the usual clarity and honesty of this exemplary writer.

Library Journal

Godwin's wide-lens perspective, and her discussion of coping with uncertainty by meditating on psalms and supporting the distribution of banned books, offers a road map for readers horrified by the state of the world. It's a balm.

Publishers Weekly

Godwin ponders the current vulnerability of democracy and the necessity of dissent along with the 'hypersonic speed' of history-in-the-making and the need to live as attentively and ethically as one can.

Booklist

Gail and I were beginning writers and Kurt Vonnegut's students when we first met. In this insightful memoir, the past and present are as purposely interwoven as the plot of a good novel. A most relevant political history is entwined with Trump's 2024 re-election and the debacle he's made of our beloved democracy. This book is about being a vigilant citizen.

John Irving

Few American novelists have spent as much time examining the moral and emotional contradictions of modern life as Woodstock resident Gail Godwin. Across a literary career spanning more than five decades-including National Book Award finalists like A Mother and Two Daughters and The Finishing School-Godwin has explored questions of identity, responsibility, intimacy, and belief with uncommon psychological precision. in The Art of Becoming a Citizen, she brings that same sensibility to civic life, reflecting on democracy not as abstraction but as a daily practice shaped by empathy, attention, and ethical responsibility. Blending memoir, cultural criticism, and philosophical inquiry, the book asks how Americans might recover a sense of shared public purpose in an increasingly fractured age.

Chronogram Magazine