Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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.

From Publishers Weekly

This supple, energized memoir chronicles Gornick's volatile relationship with her mother and her unsuccessful battle to reject a legacy of hatred, depression, humiliation and self-pity. An able storyteller with a keen ear for dialogue, Gornick (Essays in Feminism effectively montages the intimate, crude kaffeeklatsches in the Bronx tenement of her youth with street scenes from present-day Manhattan. Particularly vivid is the portrait of Nettie, the sensual, Gentile outsider among Jewish immigrant neighbors, who drives a deeper wedge between mother and daughter when she takes the young Gornick under her tutelage. The author's inherited rage particularly doomed her relationships with men, she feels, and she supplies bleak details from her failed marriage as well as her affairs with an older married man and a psychotic childhood love. Unfortunately, the insightful "deprivation litany" bogs down with "knee-jerk antagonism," therapy-talk and self-indulgence as a 48-year-old Gornick obsessively censures an 80-year-old mother.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 203 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (September 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807071234
• ISBN-13: 978-0807071236
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,073,315 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the title tells it all, February 9, 2001

By	Sandra Zickefoose "integratedconcerns" (Katonah, NY United States) - See all my reviews

I read this book 10 plus years ago. It is powerfully honest, beautifully written and particularly memorable. While my own mother had died many years before I read this book it brought her back to me in a most vivid way. No, my mother was not a thing like Ms. Gornicks--indeed my mother was a mild, defering sort--what they had in common, and what I think is at heart the power of this book, is that they were indeed both mothers. Gornick takes us to whatever it is that connects us to our mother/parent--ie a fierce attachment that is near universal. It isn't an easy thing for any of us to face our parents emotionally--feelings toward them--good or bad can tend to the extreme and coming to any rational understanding of that realtionship takes lots of work. This is where this book comes in--Gornick doesn't know our parents--or our struggles--but she describes the fierceness of the connection in her own case honestly and clearly--plus she is a talented wordsmith so she finds just the right language to do it. Anyway, I still love this book--and while I hardly ever read a book twice--(there are way too many I haven't read that I want to get to!) I think I might reread this one--maybe I am drawn to do it because I still miss my mom....whom I never got along with very well but whom I still love/can't shake off...those fierce attachment can't be undone. P.S. plus there are lots of very funny one-liners to be had in this book--what more can you ask for.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars intersesting look at the dynamics of a mother and daughter, June 25, 2001

By	lady detective "sakura kitty" (east coat) - See all my reviews

Vivian Gornick's book is filled with anecdotal incidents that culminate in a montage like telling of the relationship between herself and her mother. At times, I longed for a more linear style, or a more indepth telling of some of the stories. The end of the book, when Gormick goes into greater detail on her relationships with men in her life, was the part I enjoyed the most. I thought those retellings revealed more about her character than any of the other vignettes. I closed the book still wanting more on the mother daughter relationship, I felt like there were chunks missing. In some ways it was difficult for me to match up the mother Gornick watched as a child, and the mother she went walking with later in life.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb stylist, July 17, 2001

By A Customer

The truth is, Gornick could write about the hard bit of cheese left over and I would thill to it. She is a superb stylist and I've read all her books greedily -- precious objects that they are. This book, with its dark and painful attachment to her mother laid bare for us -- and how this attachment has acted upon all her other attempts at attachment -- is kinetic both intellectually and emotionally. She repeatedly tiptoes up to that taboo -- the lack of love that keeps a mother and daughter so intimately entwined -- and lets us stare over the lip of the abyss. I see myself, I see so many women. She is an incredible writer. Every hard won word is worth the wait. A true gem.