a book
Fierce Attachments
Vivian Gornick · 1987 · 204 pages
Vivian Gornick's relationship with her mother is difficult. At the age of forty-five, she regularly meets her mother for strolls along the streets of Manhattan. Occasionally they'll hit a pleasant stride, fondly recalling a shared nostalgia or chuckling over a mutual disgust, but most often their walks are tinged with contempt, irritation, and rages so white hot her mother will stop strangers on the street and say, "This is my daughter. She hates me". Weaving between their tempestuous present-day jaunts and the author's memories of the past, Gornick traces her lifelong struggle for independence.
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Sally Field
“Vivian Gornick’s fierce attachment is with her intelligent, uneducated Russian Jewish mother, and throughout this glorious memoir they walk through the streets of New York, arguing and raging with each other in the present and loving each other in the remembered stories of the past. Masterfully, the detailed memories of her childhood, of the ethnically diverse women who filled the Bronx tenement where she grew up, women she ‘absorbed as if they were chloroform on a cloth,’ are woven together with the present-day conversations with her mother as they walk side by side. Every page is filled with longing, and humor, and with Ms. Gornick’s complicated need to feel both close to her mother and separated from her.”↗