![]() Gornick is a year away from being my mother’s age and, as such, you’d think there was merely a weak connection for me and her childhood in a working-class Bronx, and yet. My notes and mark-ups and solitary-reading-couch chuckles resonated through my solitary apartment. At a mere 200 or so pages, I persisted and ended up, in the final third, devouring it in one sitting and loving every page. ![]() ![]() I read Fierce Attachments‘s first two-thirds desultorily, wanting so much to like, but hating every moment of it. It is neither celebration, nor fulfillment, nor acceptance, but there are glimmers of what will come to mean most to her. Primarily, Gornick’s memoir recounts the antagonistically loving relationship she had with her mother and another woman in their shared building, Nettie, who served as her mother’s alternative “voice”, to Gornick reaching her true calling, the life of the solitary. ![]() But Gornick disappointed me: there she is, growing up in a Jewish-American working-class Bronx, one generation ahead of me, writing about the “making of” a feral spinster and certainly no celebration of it. Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, I hoped, when I picked it up, would be a “fierce” rallying cry for the feral spinster. ![]()
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