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…
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