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ms_castalian 's review for:
Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
by Vivian Gornick
This book is long, and it objectively covers long stretches of time, but it reads as though time has slowed down. I put it down and I felt like I had watched perhaps an entire afternoon, with Gornick and her mother sitting there, discussing, orbiting each other, and all of the attendant issues of being a woman, marriage, dependency, creativity, intelligence, a service to society, the whole idea of BEING a public intellectual (whatever the hell that means! oh god) orbiting them like slow, sad planets. There is no resolution.
Gornick is utterly gifted, and in the introduction Lethem wonders aloud (rather rudely it seemed to me) why she never committed herself to writing fiction. To me this very book provided an answer: because the actual weights of her life, the irrevocable detail of this table cloth, that gesture, that micro-expression, have stuck to her and refused to let go. She is a brilliant memoirist, dealing more in subtlety than any other memoirist I've ever read. Does it MATTER what the laundry looked like outside the window? Um, yes. It does.
In this way the book has a kind of psychoanalytic spirit: it assumes that the smallest details, because they are remembered, must be somehow significant. This is a sumptuous way to live and to write, because we get to sit back and feel awash in the details of Gornick's life.
There is no plot. There are no answers. There are no resolutions.
There is just this spinning suspension, as the book ends with Gornick's mother saying, "I never stopped you from leaving me," and of course, Gornick says, "I know." As a result, I cannot end this review gracefully. Read this book if you want to feel like you are taking a bath, and the water is a fierce Jewish woman whose emotional world is so large you feel dwarfed, insignificant, and yet somehow still needed.
Gornick is utterly gifted, and in the introduction Lethem wonders aloud (rather rudely it seemed to me) why she never committed herself to writing fiction. To me this very book provided an answer: because the actual weights of her life, the irrevocable detail of this table cloth, that gesture, that micro-expression, have stuck to her and refused to let go. She is a brilliant memoirist, dealing more in subtlety than any other memoirist I've ever read. Does it MATTER what the laundry looked like outside the window? Um, yes. It does.
In this way the book has a kind of psychoanalytic spirit: it assumes that the smallest details, because they are remembered, must be somehow significant. This is a sumptuous way to live and to write, because we get to sit back and feel awash in the details of Gornick's life.
There is no plot. There are no answers. There are no resolutions.
Spoiler
There is just this spinning suspension, as the book ends with Gornick's mother saying, "I never stopped you from leaving me," and of course, Gornick says, "I know."