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Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
by Vivian Gornick
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Product Description
In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond.
Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work.
As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother.
Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre.
Amazon.com Review
Rarely is the barbed edge of mother love described with such scorching wit and raw emotion as it is in Vivian Gornick's reissued memoir. Fierce Attachments zigzags between a Bronx tenement teeming with immigrants in the 1940s and New York in the 1980s. It chronicles an almighty struggle between the author and her mother, a stubborn rabble-rouser bursting with tart, angry pronouncements, moxie, and an undeniable measure of charm. Waving away an "Eastern religionist" trying to sell her on his god, she raps out: "Young man, I am a Jew and a socialist. I think that's more than enough for one lifetime, don't you?" Her husband's untimely death is the occasion for such wild histrionics--screaming, refusing to walk, flinging herself into the grave--that when Gornick works the Middle East years later as a journalist, the ululating cries and fainting mourners at funerals seem comfortably familiar. The rapid-fire flow of confidences and furious arguments between the duo mellow slightly, believably, as they grow older together.
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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Made me shudder, 2009-05-25
I have nothing to say about the quality of writing in this book, but I found the story very unpleasant, for some reason--probably the chilliness of Vivian Gornick's "marriage." I had to read it in a creative writing course as an example of a memoir, and I disliked it so intensely that after the semester, I disposed of it. Until then, I didn't realizer how hard laminated covers made it for trade paperbacks to burn. From the overall tone of the book, Gornick comes off as the coldest Marxist since Bertolt Brecht.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fierce Presentation, 2007-10-29
Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments makes for an exciting and thought-provoking read. Her memoir has a relatable simplicity written through an innovative perspective. She presents her narrative with great analysis and at the same time provides a light-hearted feel.
Every scene is full of life. Unconventionally, Gornick chooses to stray away from chapter divisions--it in no way takes away from the story. The story, in fact, flows better without chapter titles previewing the next memory. Every memory is described extensively passed tangible objects in the room. She goes beyond showing and enables the reader to feel the emotions in the room: "The living room...Here you took a deep breath, held it until you were smothering, then either got out or went under. In the kitchen...You could breathe. You could live" (68-67). The reader has gone past visualizing and is there. Every character and scene developed enhances the story.
The scenes chosen are just important to the memoir as the writing. After Gornick presents an eventful memory, she moves to a walk in the city with her mother. Each walk filled with dialogue reflecting the emotions of the juxtaposed memory. It is clear how the tumultuous relationship with her mother influences her choices and her persona. A great example appears in one of her few heartwarming connections with her mother. She, after a close neighbor Nettie tries to console her, discovers "Mama was where [she] belonged" (71). Gornick accompanies this memory with that of her walk down a sunlit Eighth Avenue where she predicts her mother's defensive reaction before it happens. In a new state of mind, she "[becomes] irritated but [remains] calm. Not falling into a rage..." that she knows she usually would (74).
The memoir lures the reader in. With no dull moments, the reader is left without an opportunity for a bathroom break. The descriptive scenes with relatable reflections put this memoir above the rest. Fierce Attachments is a fierce read.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
An unpleasant memoir about horrible people, 2006-05-26
This memoir is Gornick doing a hatchet job on her mother. Gornick's mother is a pathological arrogant narcissist who verbally abuses everyone around her, including and especially Gornick. The dimension of it that Gornick seems not to see at all is that she is identical. She abuses her mother and everyone else with the same pointless malice her mother turns on her. It is two hundred pages of two pathological personalities who make themselves and everyone around them miserable. Their constant discourse is arrogance, insult, accusation, blame, and dismissiveness. They never stop bickering bitterly with each other and everyone else. Gornick is as blind to what a loathsome person she is as her mother is. One tires of them quickly.
The proposition that Gornick can write comes from her inserting pompous epigrams at the end of each section. Few of these are original and none are good enough to bear the weight she puts on them.
This is a thoroughly unpleasant book and well worth skipping.
4 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Cliched, all around., 2004-05-25
Upon first reading Fierce Attachments, I thought that it was an acceptable novel- interesting anecdotes, good dialogue, etc. However, after thinking it through and re-reading sections, it became painfully clear that Gornick has no deep insights to tell us, and because of this lack of original and profound thought, she writes about cliched things in a cliched manner. Yes, the novel can be entertaining, especially if the subject matter holds interest. In my opinion, get it from the library. It's not worth the money.
15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
Be Aware of Gornick's Feelings About Memoirs, 2003-08-13
I think one would be hard put to find a reviewer who thinks that Gornick can't write, or that she doesn't have insights that other people feel are incisive and/or applicable to their own lives. I will not dispute any of this; this is an excellently-written book that does a wonderful job exploring the mother/daughter relationship. (Not being either one, I'm somewhat handicapped at commenting on how accurate it is in that area.)
I do think, however, that one should be aware of Gornick's take on what constitutes a memoir. Gornick has written that she views the lives on which a memoir is based to be the "rough draft." She feels that the "memoir" does not need to be held to the strict standards of truefulness that other non-fiction is. (For details on Gronick's take on what a memoir is, please read her piece in Salon: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/08/12/memoir_writing/index.html
Personally, I find her explanations unsatisfactory, and her justifications to be rationalizations at best. I do not get enjoyment from the literary technique of an unreliable narrator, no matter how many literary persons find it to be a brilliant technique for exploring whatever (the universality of subjectivity, the unreliability of supposed objectivity, the capricious nature of life, or what have you), and similarly I have trouble with the concept of a "memoir" that is, at it's base, a piece of fiction. Perhaps I am a philistine, but I much prefer something like "The Ladies Auxiliarly," which, while certainly *based* on the author's life, does not pretend in any way to *be* life.
That caveat aside, I *do* honestly think that this is a very good book that many will enjoy. Just caveat emptor, is all.
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