Fierce Attachments

I'm Rebecca Hussey, and I'm here with Frances Evangelista and Dorian Stuber.

And today we're discussing Vivian Gornick's memoir, Fierce Attachments, which was published in 1987, when Gornick was 52.

She So it's the story of Gornick's childhood and the early decades of her adult life, focusing on her relationship with her mother, a powerful, dramatic, complicated woman against whom Gornick struggles in her efforts to understand herself and what she wants her life to be.

The narration has two different strands.

And the second is set close to the time of the book's composition and is made up of walks Gornick and her mother take around Manhattan as they reminisce and argue and entertain each other.

So we see them in Gornick's early years and also much later as they rehash the past and continue to struggle with how to get along in the present.

This mother-daughter dyad is one of the fierce attachments of the title, but there are more.

There's Nettie, a neighbor woman who fascinates and troubles Gornick and exerts an erotic pull on her and is an important and troubling part of her sexual education.