Join a Book Discussion in 2023!
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Thursday April 20th at 7:00 pm
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Discussion led by Rachel Ranis
Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments―hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author's "mesmerizing, thrilling" truths within its pages―has been selected by the publication's book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.
In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the principal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond.
Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work.
Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre.
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