Her high brimming nose saved her from being called moonface like I was as a kid. Susie, the kindred friend from grade school and I had grown together. I moved away but we keep in touch because I feel good and sentimental about home through her phone calls. I like hearing about where Susie still [...]
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Posted in Fierce Attachments on February 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Why does <I> Fierce Attachments </I> draw me in effortlessly in a way that the previous two memoirs haven’t?
Some answers are easy: I feel compelled by and drawn into the story Gornick is telling. Her stories of fierce, complicated and angry mother-daughter, and young girl-woman connections inside an immigrant, urban milleu are some things I [...]
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Posted in Fierce Attachments on February 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
When I went and looked into the whole entire “oh how accurate must a memoir be?” argument between Maureen Corrigan and Gornick, I found myself feeling almost furious at Corrigan’s need to encapsulate the absolute truth. Gornick’s work is real because it informs us of a realm of environmental mysterium that can be effectively [...]
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I was excited to read Fierce Attachments because Elmaz kept referring to it as a linear story. I wondered how could you tell a story from start to finish without reverting to flashbacks or back story summaries? So when I read the first couple of pages that flipped back and forth between [...]
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Posted in Fierce Attachments on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
In reading this memoir, purportedly about a mother/daughter relationship over roughly half of the author’s lifetime, I kept waiting for the big reveal. (There is that wily old reader expectation, come back to rear its head.) What I found though, was a lesson on structure and scaffolding that was far more edifying than any climactic moment [...]
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Posted in Fierce Attachments on February 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Gornick’s memoir is a telling continuum trying to make sense of intergenerational inheritance and the “…psychological distribution of shared space…” (149). In her book, she strings together multiple conversations over many years to identify a cyclical relationship between belonging and place. The memoir moves through psychological space as well as chronological time, [...]
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After three days of slow and deliberate reading, I finally made it through the last words of Fierce Attachments. It was Saturday afternoon and I immediately sat down at my computer to “try to think” and write, but no words or thoughts came to me. Scenes from the book just replayed themselves over and [...]
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Posted in Fierce Attachments on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Fierce Attachments for me was quite fierce. It impaled my heart in a good way. I was with them through their rage, heart breaks and endearing moments. The depictions of their lives were so raw and unscripted and yet they still remained attached to one another.
The fierce attachment between the three of them was [...]
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Posted in Fierce Attachments on February 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I’m experiencing a fierce attachment to Fierce Attachments. I finished this book over a week ago and am still feeling resistance to letting go. In fact, I haven’t made it past the first chapter of Soldier yet because Gornick’s book is lingering so insistently. Personally, I feel little concern over whether her story is literally, [...]
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Posted in Fierce Attachments on February 24, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Gornick is transfixing us through time by giving us a mental map of each conversation and centralizing it in the streets, i.e. “We were walking west on Twenty-third Street” each time Gornick and her mother navigate a different street they are also navigating and reimagining memories and the present past is also bathed into the [...]
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