Fierce Attachments: A Memoir — By Vivian Gornick
Deborah Tannen’s You’re Wearning That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation uses several examples from Gornick’s memoir, which attracted my interest to this book.
Gornick writes of growing up in a Bronx tenement, about her relationship with her mother, and their relationships with the neighbors, especially the disturbed and disturbing widow Nettie. The book flashes back and forth between Gornick’s youth in the forties and fifties, and conversations she and her mother have in the eighties, walking the streets of Manhattan together.
The title here is well-chosen. The relationship is fierce and often angry. I found this interesting, but rather unpleasant reading, and I felt relieved when I reached the end and was able to close the book on this family.
