Instead of the carefully honed phrases and single-minded convictions of rhetoric, Gornick’s musings and questions strike complex, often ambiguous tonalities. What little the book does contain in the way of homage to the salvaging effect of politics seem like obligatory bows in the direction of distant gods. Interestingly enough, coming as it does from a self-defined feminist and leftist (Gornick is the author of, among other volumes, “Essays in Feminism” and “The Romance of American Communism”), “Fierce Attachments” is almost free of ideological agendas. It is a story that should be of interest to both sexes but will undoubtedly engage female readers, for whom matters of selfhood (despite proclamations to the contrary) seem to be especially problematic. The specific data of her personal history notwithstanding, Gornick’s story is a generic, timeless one: the Search for a Self, for a bounded identity. Gornick has written a private reminiscence, with the thinnest patina of structure, yet the vividness of her style and the honesty of her perception are such that they infuse her account with the force of parable. Brimming with life, with what the author describes as “a kind of idiot attention to the look and feel of things,” it is a sustained close-up of a mother-daughter relationship-that much examined, deified, and excoriated arrangement of birth in which all women find themselves. Fierce Attachments,” the somewhat literal, even clinical-sounding title of Vivian Gornick’s memoir, is a book that will leave its readers anything but dispassionate.
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