Book description
The author recounts her childhood experiences living in a tenement, looks at her relationship with her mother, and describes the lives of women bound to husbands they didn't love
Why read it?
2 authors picked Fierce Attachments as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This is a stimulating memoir about that peculiar love-hate battle between two strong-willed women who happen to be mother and daughter.
There were moments in this searingly honest biography where I felt complete fellow-feeling with the author, re-experiencing similar moments of drama in my own family.
From Bibi's list on The best books that explore mother and daughter relationships under strain.
Gornick is having a moment in her eighties, and that alone is exciting for me, also in my 80s, and looking to her as a model. And so I reopened this tough, probing, amusing, enlightening memoir.
It is so confident, her experience so meticulously depicted; reading it is like receiving a series of pleasant electrical shocks. Except for our both having been raised by contentious, critical, strong-willed mothers whose hold on us was uncanny, our childhoods were utterly different.
But I read her with the thrill of recognition - of her longing for a larger world while remaining attached to…
If you love Fierce Attachments...
The Pianist's Only Daughter
The Pianist’s Only Daughter: A Memoir is an authentic, poignant, and sometimes humorous exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family.
Only daughter and geriatric social worker Kathryn Betts Adams brings to life her colorful, emotionally volatile parents, an English teacher/poet and a music professor/concert pianist, from their early…
Want books like Fierce Attachments?
Our community of 13,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Fierce Attachments.
Share your top 3 reads of 2026!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
181
readers submitted
so far, will you?
