Flâneuse is the feminine form of flâneur, a dawdling observer who habitually walks a city, and it would be hard to find a better exemplar of the species than Vivian Gornick, as she portrays herself in her 2015 memoir, The Odd Woman and the City.
A lifelong lover of New York City, Gornick portrays two fascinating kinds of relationships in the book: an arm’s-length attachment to her best friend Leonard and fleeting yet highly meaningful encounters with strangers. Both might be described as types of independent intimacy – deep engagements with boundaries that keep Gornick simultaneously involved in the stream of life and free. Although I don’t believe such connections are characteristic of all or even most introverts, their dynamics illustrate certain introvert tendencies.