Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

Spectacular writing that made for a spectacular reading experience. Such fun to find a new favorite—a book that I will certainly go back to reread favorite passages. It is a book to share; I read passages out loud to my husband. He liked it too.

Searing memories, fine writing, leaves the reader breathless and of very mixed feelings about this extreme self- and other-revelation. Revelation is clearly not in the service of sensationalism. Rather, the telling heightens the understanding of any mother or daughter about issues common to all of us. So I found it inspired much thoughtfulness on my part. But, privacy falls victim. Was this book written while Gornick's mother was still alive? Much more akin to the daughter than to the mother, and quite horrified by some of the mother's actions, I nevertheless empathized with what would (I imagine) have been very hard for her to read. And yes, other reviewers have said the book presents both mother and daughter's sides of the story. Well worth reading. You don't even have to be Jewish, though familiarity with the culture of the period of Gornick's childhood helps a lot.

Gormick gives us an unflinching look across her life as a child, as a daughter, as a teenager, as a student, as a writer and as a woman through the prism of her personal relationships. It captures the conundrums and paradoxes of the puzzling life of the generations of "American" children who are born with the expectation that they succeed their immigrant parents in New York, yet honor them by never quite becoming independent of their (parents') influence, thrall, and will. The love, passions, regrets, conflict, and obligation that come with "survival" are deftly explored at times with great empathy and at other times with angry recrimination. Skillfully written and teeming with personal insights that will tug at many readers' most defended preconceptions, presumptions, and ideals; The lifelong arc and sweep of this memoir challenges many of our privately held beliefs about love and it explores, often in decidedly indelicate and brutal fashion, the relationships between lovers, friends, and parents.

My problem with this memoir, I guess, is that I was not that interested in the author nor her relationship with her mother. There are some compelling passages, a sample of which is below. While Gornick was attached to her mother, at best she could “come close to loving her”. In college Gornick reads a history of different concepts of love, but surprisingly, as an intellectual, she never defines her own concept. She does tell her mother “that nowadays love has to be earned. Even by mothers and sons”. Her mother’s depression was a blight on Gornick’s life. She expresses the theory that “In refusing to recover from my father’s death she (her mother) had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness for thirty years”. Gornick herself did try psychotherapy. The things that most made Gornick happy were ideas, thinking, writing, discussing, giving speeches. She very much enjoyed sex, walking (and riding a bicycle as a kid), street life and “a tree outside that filled the window (of her small apartment) in spring and summer with birds and foliage”. She had friends, including a life long childhood friend, but they are not celebrated. PASSAGES. Outside the tenement window, “The clear air, the unshadowed light, the women calling to each other, the sounds of their voices mixed with the smell of clothes drying in the sun, all that texture and color swaying in open space”. “The quarrel between Nettie and Mama, when it broke out, moved with the speed of brushfire. Released from subterranean heat, it burned so hot, so fast, within seconds it had achieved scorched earth: on this ground nothing would grow again.” “The only strangers at the wedding were Stefan (her 1st husband) and I”. “His (a lover) intelligence was like a piece of railroad track, …….. with a single train car riding it back and forth between stations, imitating motion and journey”. “Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard”. “Its making me lonely now to make love with you, and you not know what my life is about”.

Vivian Gornick’s brutally honest memoir, Fierce Attachments, sets a high standard for “personal journalism,” as this writer is unbowed by past definitions of what is considered appropriate for autobiographic material. She fearlessly tells of her smothering and inspiring relationship with her fierce, widowed mother, a relationship which sets the template for all her future relationships. Brusquely poetic, Gornick lets us into her most intimate feelings as she struggles with life’s choices of love and work. A legendary writer of the Village Voice from the 1970s, she excels at writing about emotional truth.

i love memoirs and this one is among the best (i prefer patti smith's Just Kids). i love the way so much can be conveyed in just a few simple but deep observations. sometimes i think memoirs get mistaken for autobiographies in which the reader wants to know everything in the plot line of the author, but a good memoir is not that. the only reason i moved this from a five star to a four star is that i felt the section about her personal relationships was rushed and not written in the say way she wrote about growing up or about her mother. i felt the memoir "recapped" things when it came to explaining her relationships instead of inviting us into the moment as was often the case when she wrote about time spent with her mother. but all that aside, i still went ahead and purchased two more of her books because i DO like the way she writes and the insight she shares about life on this planet earth.

Me gustó. Si estás buscando una biografía que abarque relación madre hija este libro es para ti.

Vivian Gornick is a New York writer known for her memoirs and essays. 'Fierce Attachments' takes the idea of the 'flaneu'r and translates it into journeys through New York streets taken by the author and her mother. These walks are intercut by a 'sentimental' interior journey through their shared history, centred on the author's attempts to achieve independence without abandoning her past. There are some wonderful vignettes of New York life -particularly women's lives - such as the sections set in the Bronx building where Gornick grew up. It's a book about loss and disappointment but also about the curious forms love can take between a mother and daughter. I'm aware that that might make it seem mawkish or trite, it is anything but. As fierce in places as its title suggests, for me it was an intimate, intense, intelligent and tender revelation; written in beautifully constructed prose. I was so taken with it, I immediately bought another of Gornick's work and wondered how I had lived without her voice for so long.

Le dispositif d'écriture binaire est simple et fonctionne bien (allers-retours passé/présent). La simplicité de l'écriture alliée à la pertinence et à la sensibilité des observations rend l'ensemble vibrant et réaliste. Le lecteur plonge dans les personnages, devient chacune d'elles pendant un instant. Juste et bouleversant.

Este libro dedicado a una madre, y a una ciudad, Nueva York. Vivido, real, interesantísimo, fantásticamente bien escrito. Libros por los que apetecería dejarlo todo y ponerse a escribir! Me siento como caminando con ellas por ese NYC maravilloso de otoño.

Leest goed. Psychologie van de nature &nurture in dochter- moeder relatie.