Fierce Attachments: A Memoir - Hardcover

Gornick, Vivian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374154856 ISBN 13: 9780374154851

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1987

Synopsis

The author recounts her childhood experiences living in a tenement, looks at her relationship with her mother, and describes the lives of women bound to husbands they didn't love

About this title

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.

About the Author:

Vivian Gornick, "one of the most vital and indispensable essayists of our cultural moment" (Phillip Lopate), has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other journals.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0374154856
• ISBN 13: 9780374154851
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 203