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 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...
Performance Anxiety
Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.…
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