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BOOKS I READ: Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick (1987). There’s much fierceness in the riveting and very candid stories in this memoir of growing up in the Bronx among other Jewish families, and Nettie, an irrepressible and irreverent Ukrainian who loses her husband much too young. Gornick interleaves present day conversations with her mother while strolling Manhattan, a relentlessly combative back-and-forth that is always bewildering. As the book moves forward in time, we encounter Gornick’s piercing analyses of her relationships with three deficient men. They hang on too long before she and they recognize the faulty foundations. Yet, you never stop rooting for her. Your only wish is that she would be more pleasant to her mom.
Her description of how, while attending City College, she realizes the possibility and allure of an intellectual mind and an intellectual life, is a nod to the awaking that is possible on the fertile grounds of a university, but also how that awakening can cleave away the world you came from.
NB: While scraping the book cover image, I learned that, in 2019, Fierce Attachments was hailed by The New York Times as the best memoir of the last fifty years. I’m glad I had missed that tidbit until after I had finished the book.
