Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments--hailed by the New York Times
for the renowned feminist author's "mesmerizing, thrilling" truths
within its pages--has been selected by the publication's book critics as
the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.
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 principal 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.
"[Gornick] stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult,
strange, unresolvable in herself and others--at loneliness, sexual
malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and
daughters...[Fierce Attachments is] a portrait of the artist as she
finds a language--original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic
banalities--worthy of the women that raised her."--The New York
Times
