Fierce Attachments

"In her memoir, Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick intertwines stories of her childhood with various recounts of walking through New York with her mother as an adult. Because her story deals with a large chunk of time, Gornick continuously jumps from childhood to adulthood and back again. Sometimes, she announces when exactly the event occurred. For instance, she begins her memoir with, "I'm eight years old" (Gornick 1). Other times, the reader is unsure at what point in her life the event she is recounting happened, leaving them to assume or gain a sense of time through context of the story. During the bulk of these stories, Gornick offers her current perspective, letting the reader know what she remembers, what she doesn't, and how she sees this event differently now that she's older. Her memory proves to be strong, sometimes giving off full and long pieces of conversation and dialogue, as if she remembers the words as clearly as the day she said/heard them. <br/><br/>The most prevalent themes throughout the memoir are Gornick's relationship with her mother and their difference of opinion on the idea of love. Early on in her childhood, Gornick describes her mother in a way that suggests a sort of secret admiration for her, leaving the reader to wonder what happened between them to make her say, "My relationship with my mother is not good…" (3) The answer to this comes later in the memoir when Gornick reveals the death of her father when she was 13. Her mother goes into a state of depression, crying and mourning him, which "became her profession, her identity, her persona" (68). Despite the haughty way in which she describes her mother's obsession with life and love, she repeatedly discovers through interactions with old friends and self-assessments that she is exactly like her mother. <br/><br/>While their relationship is at the forefront of the memoir, Gornick also mentions relationships with past lovers and neighbors. Her longtime neighbor, Nettie, serves as an opposing force to that of Gornick's mother because she is "soft" and "beautiful". Nettie goes on to play a part in Gornick's view of love and marriage, something that becomes a point of contention between her and her mother. With past lovers, Gornick always begins by stating their best qualities and then dives deeper into why she feels the relationship didn't work out. With Stefan, her ex-husband, she shared a mutual agreement that work was the most important thing, not love. She states that they accustomed themselves "to an atmosphere of domestic tension" (Gornick 128). Davey was big on the idea of "us", something she felt wasn't necessary. Joe, a married man, didn't "love" and want her enough. Through these interactions the reader can see an inner battle going on in Gornick. She is torn between wanting love and thinking it not necessary. This can be traced back to the opposing views of Nettie and her mother. <br/><br/>Gornick's self-professed love for words can be seen with the language and figure of speech she employs throughout her memoir. She frequently uses words that showcase her education and presents them in a way that isn't pretentious but rather done to make the story flow and seem more natural. Words such as conciliatory, amelioration, languorous, camaraderie, are thrown throughout this piece as if they belong there. Gornick seems to favor the word fantasizing, as she uses it multiple times from beginning to end of her memoir. She uses this word most notably when speaking about her relationship with Joe, stating, "I would walk in the sweet hours of final daylight, fantasizing about us" (Gornick 155). This plays into the fact that Gornick never felt like Joe wanted her as much as she wanted him. She also repeatedly refers to a "whitewashed room", first, in a dream she has about her father and again when she talks about her first apartment and the apartment she had after her marriage ended. It seems as though she feels a whitewashed room is something of a new beginning, like wiping the slate clean. Another metaphor repeated throughout the story is the comparison of the balance between life, work, and love to a rectangle inside of her. As for other figures of speech, Gornick can be seen using personification to drive her point across. In talking about her mother's pain, she states, "Her pain became my element… it commanded me, made me respond against my will" (Gornick 69). She also uses personification when talking about her work, "the sentences began pushing up in me, struggling to get out" (Gornick 135). Through her descriptions and use of words, the reader can feel Gornick's pain, relive her life as she did, and empathize with her struggle to free herself from the relationships she feels she is fiercely attached to. By the end of the memoir, she is secure in the fact that she is her mother through and through but does not feel threatened or less than because of this fact. <br/>"