Vivian Gornick: Fierce Attachment

I wanted to read this book because it ranked number one on The New York Time’s “The Best 50 Memoirs of the Past 50 Years.” It is a well-deserved recognition. In a concise, two-hundred-page memoir, Gornick recounts her fierce, unflinching relationship with her forceful mother: “We are locked into a narrow channel of acquaintance, intense and binding.” In writing about her childhood, Gornick gives readers a sense of what it was like living in the Bronx building where noise, music, food, and sex always occurred. From her expose to and experience with sex to her rocky relationship with her husband to her open affair with a married man after her marriage had ended, Gornick writes with feeling, freedom, and fearlessness. In addition to the emotional, blunt honesty, I love Gornick’s impeccable prose.