Gornick was affected especially by her mother-mercurial, unlettered, brilliant-and by Nettie, an overripe, artistic, emotionally damaged widow next door.įreshmen can’t relate. What was I thinking? There’s a story here, but one it takes an adult to see: a woman trying to understand her mother, herself, and how her past forged her. That may be a slight overstatement, but they aren’t enjoying it-it’s not a book for kids. I have two classes of freshmen reading it and they hate it. I’ve always found the latter rather slippery-seemingly too simple, it suddenly drops into murky depths-but Fierce Attachments’ brilliant use of the memoirist’s dual persona (me then, me now) brings her theories into focus.Īll the same, my current reading of Fierce Attachments, originally published in 1987, is shadowed by disaster. I’m embarrassed it has taken me so long to read it, especially since I’ve read Vivian Gornick’s short book of memoir theory, The Situation and the Story, many times. Fierce Attachments stands with another classic literary memoir, John Updike’s Self-Consciousness, and surpasses by dint of its warm humanity Vladimir Nabokov’s chilly Speak, Memory.
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