Fierce Attachments

Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments was published in 1987, when the writer and critic was 52 years old. The focus of this memoir is her tempestuous relationship with her mother, something that morphed and shifted as Gornick herself grew older, but always remained intense and challenging. Gornick and her mother (in her eighties when thus was published) who live a mile apart in lower Manhattan, regularly take walks around the city together. They exchange stories from the past, from their years living in the Bronx in the 1940s, gossip about neighbours from long ago, sometimes even running into them unexpectedly on the street. But you never know when a pleasant conversation between mother and daughter will suddenly erupt in rage, or when an exchange that starts out prickly will quickly be defused by one of them who chooses to let things go (for that moment). 

A particularly challenging period for Gornick was after her father’s death (she was thirteen). Her mother, consumed by grief, spent the next nearly thirty years refusing to come to terms with the loss. Gornick writes of her mother in this period that this loss “elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech. Papa’s death became a religion that provided ceremony and doctrine. A woman-who-has-lost-the-love-of-her-life was now her orthodoxy…” As a teenager, Vivian was lost, living in the shadow of her mother’s perpetual gloom.

And yet, despite attempts at independence - through her years of college, becoming an established journalist and critic, her marriage (and divorce) - Gornick remained her mother’s daughter. While she found it hard to bear her, she found it impossible to give her up. 

This is not a light read by any means but it is a compelling one, and I was completely drawn in by Vivian Gornick’s unfussy and clear writing style. The Odd Woman and The City is going on my list.